From: Laura Melton
Sent: Wed 14-Jan-04 11:54
To: Kathleen Agnew
Subject: Innovative canned-reports functions


Kathy, here are my notes and understandings from talking and playing with
Innovative:


There are some canned statistical reports that are available through a Web
interface, and those are pretty good.  They display in HTML tables and can be
downloaded in a format understandable by Excel (though I didn't try that).
Furthermore, the pages have persistent URLs that can be emailed around etc.
 
Statistical reports are generally good, automatic pie charts, etc.
 
The problem lies with the Holdings reports that branches commonly need.  Until
this fall, whenever branches wanted lists of certain parts of their collections,
they had to ask Meg, who would generate the report by hand.  Then I started
automating the process and made it possible for branches to run scripts that
would generate a pre-defined report and email it to them in a comma-delimited
format that is readable by Excel.  Over the past few months I have received
nothing but positive feedback about the reports.  Many librarians and LAs are
using them and finding them very useful; I also get queries about kinds of
reports that are not possible with the current scripts but that I can fairly
easily generate by hand.
 
Giving branch staff the ability to pull information about their own collections
saves Service Center staff time.  In addition to the reports that Meg and I used
to run for staff all the time, many of which were fairly standard and easily
automated, Anne Hansberry (and other Acq staff?) used to generate dusty-books
lists for branches periodically (every month?).  These reports were printed on
green-bar paper and were very cumbersome.  This is now a function that branches
can perform electronically.
 
Giving branch staff the ability to pull information about their own collections
also can increase efficiency.  One of the scripted reports pulls items belonging
to a certain branch that have been in transit for more than a week.  This report
allows branch staff to track down the actual location of these items and to take
them out of limbo.
 
These scripts do have problems, and I am looking forward to correcting those
issues with the new Millennium system.  For example, staff have had trouble
understanding how to make the reports function properly.  It is my hope that a
better-documented Web-based interface, perhaps connected to the Intranet, would
be easier to use and facilitate even more customization of reports.
 
Millennium's GUI interface does not allow canned reports such as I have described.
It is possible to generate searches, to save queries, to export records in an
Excel-readable format, and to allow certain staff members to the "Create Lists"
function.  However, it is not possible to reduce the process of generating lists
to a two- or three-click job.  They must negotiate the complicated interface and
be confronted with a confusing mess of fields to select and display.  Showing
branch staff this level of detail would surely confuse them unnecessarily; they
don't need to know exactly how it's done.  Furthermore, giving them access to it
would allow them to change it and possibly screw up the report for future users.
They would require much more instruction, and the whole system would be so
complicated and cumbersome as to preclude use.
 
On the other hand, use of the Oracle database would allow myself or another ITS
staff member to write scripts in Perl or PHP or ColdFusion or ASP or Java or
almost any other programming language that could pull data from the database,
massage it, and output it in a user-friendly format.  The user interface could
be as simple as a one-click dusty report.  With Oracle, the programming
possibilities are endless.
 

Laura Melton
ITS Student Intern
King County Library System