Melvyl Enhancements – February 2012

On February 28, 2012 (12:38 PM PST), OCLC announced the roll back of the software changes installed on Feb. 26 due to some performance issues. OCLC has since announced that the re-installation of the quarterly software changes is scheduled to begin on Saturday, March 3, 2012 at 11:00 PM through 5:00 AM PDT on Sunday, March 4, 2012.

OCLC has announced that they were able to develop and install many of the new features and software corrections earlier than in their normally planned February install on Sunday, February 26.  In December 2011 and January 2012 OCLC rolled out features originally scheduled for the February 2012 install.

As a result, this month’s enhancement list contains only one item:  WorldCat Local now has the capability to display non-Roman characters correctly on the ‘Details’ page.  With this improvement, non-Romanized languages such as Hindi, Polish, Arabic and all of the Asian languages will now display correctly.

Below is a review of the enhancements impacting Melvyl that were installed in December 2011 and January 2012 with the date the item was released.   (Some items in the Release Notes PDF do not apply to the UC libraries’ versions of Melvyl because they refer to features UC has not yet activated.  Features that are not currently turned on for UC may be added in the future.)

• Installed updated version of reCAPTCHA’s API key which should alleviate some of the frustration that has been experienced by some libraries.  Additional work continues in the removal of the reCAPTCHA challenge from the Local interface for authenticated users.  December 15, 2011
• Installed fix for the recent OpenURL resolution issues that several libraries were encountering.  The problem was causing users to be resolved to the incorrect full text for an item, in particular items using PMIDs. December 15, 2011
• Corrected the “View Now” link so it will not appear if no links are available.  The grayed out ‘view now” caused confusion and now will not display when links to full-text are not found for all circumstances except when Local OPAC eLinking is enabled.  In this case, the ‘View Now’ link will continue to display and the call to the Local OPAC to retrieve links will occur upon the user clicking this link. January 11, 2012
• Removed the “Local system down” message.  There were occurrences of a ‘local system down’ error message appearing when availability information was retrieved causing confusion to the users.  This message has now been removed in these scenarios.  January 11, 2012
• Corrected the scoping persistence for the “Libraries to search” as selected until changed by user or new search conducted.  January 11, 2012