Children's dept printer

The printer in the children's department will not print. It was fine for the first three hours of my shift (I printed several notices) but then it just stopped. The error message says the spooler could not connect with the printer. Printer seems to be plugged in and turned on...

CCLS "cleanup" of the Y drive

Fran Adams "cleaned up" the Y drive Monday, and took away practically everything:
Shelf Check Contacts, Catalog maintenance files, System stats, Lump sum stats, Millennium training materials, and heaven only knows what else.

I spent a good part of Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning talking with CCLS staff, and eventually with Tony Wagner, to get these files restored. Unfortunately, Tony's solution was on the basis of "name the files you want me to put back," so files that we use infrequently-- but that are still vitally important when needed-- may not be missed for months.

I can't believe Tony and Fran could sit through years of CC-LINK meetings where these files and folders are frequently referred to, and then just delete them all. (Two of the missing folders were mentioned in the minutes for September's CCL-LINK).

HelpStar fail

The Helpstar new request form is still broken. It won't accept a new request unless you have filled in the "category" field, but the drop-down menu is blank and you can't just type into the field.  You have to double click on the words "select a category" in order to see and select from their list.  This is nowhere apparent from the page you see; CCLS Computer Services tells you how to do it when you call to complain that Helpstar is broken.

Millennium VS HP Inkjet

This is an ongoing problem, but not an urgent one. While in general I have no problem printing to the HP Inkjet 2200 (at my desk), I cannot print to this printer from Millennium. Since many of the Millenium screens -- paging lists, overdues, bills -- require you to clear a list after printing (with no way to retrieve it), printing to a printer back in the workroom is slightly inconvenient.

Communication between Millenium and the laser printer at Valerie's desk is a crap shoot -- some days you win, some days you lose.

And an interesting feature of Millenium that I have no desire to "fix" -- it bypasses the "locked print" feature when printing to the Ricoh.

Ricoh machines

Valerie and I had to reassemble one of the Ricoh machines (printer #1) again on Tuesday. When I opened the door to clear a paper jam, one of the little white drive wheels fell out on the ground.

Help Star interface

I tried to send a helpstar today and kept getting a message that I had to choose a category, but there were no categories to chose in the drop-down menu.

I finally called Jermaine at the Help Desk, and he had the same problem. Eventually he discovered that if you click on the "choose category" option in the pull-down menu, you get a pop-up window of categories, and you can choose from there.

But it's a pretty stupid interface if it took two of us 10 minutes to figure it out...

610-280-BOOK

On Sept 10 a TR patron responded to a CCLS reminder email with a report that the automatic book renewal was down. The CCL "notices" staff forwarded the message to me because it was a TR patron.

This morning I checked the line and it was still down. No one else noticed in the course of the week???

I put it a help star and Theresa was able to fix the problem quickly (the machine had rebooted somehow and she just had to log in)

Introducing the Tredyffrin Tech Trouble Log

This blog will create an account of information technology issues and solutions within the library. The purpose is to identify recurring technical troubles, share information among the staff, and identify trends within the building, while keeping this message traffic off the regular blog. The information I hope to record here includes but is not limited to:

• Printing problems


• Millennium issues


• Unexpected computer settings changes


• Mechanical difficulties and broken stuff


• Weird error messages


• Login/password problems


• Anything goes into HelpStar


• Telephone system malfunctions

So, you are all invited to make entries here and to check this blog for issues that others have entered. If you submit items to HelpStar, it would be helpful if you could copy/paste the same info here. If a problem directly affect patrons or volunteers, or you have encountered this particular problem more than once, please note that in your message.

I appreciate your participation, the more so because I am asking you to do something extra when we are already over-extended on the job. Let's try this through the end of the year; that's a long enough experiment to discover if this is a useful process.

-Pam