3rd Barton OPAC
Quirks, Known Problems
and Loose Ends
Last
updated: 12/04/2003 TAG
The new no-frames version:
How to get the security popup to go away when accessing Barton through IE (and sometimes with Netscape and Mozilla): It is necessary
to install the MIT CA certificate: Click on Get MIT CA, choose to Open it, and then accept all the default questions. Further
down the page are more information about certificate settings, and how
to tell if you've already got the MIT CA. |
Problem report: I do a Barton ALEPH advanced or basic search and Barton responds with the number of references (i.e. 1-11)of 11 but does not show the specific references on the screen. Answer: Usually, if you make the screen wider or maximize it, the results will reappear. What's happening, if the window is too small, is that the results get pushed over to the right. If you use the horizontal scroll bar, you can see the results without resizing the window. Another possibility:The user may be trying to use a bookmark into ALEPH that points to our old version. If this is the case they need to update their bookmark. |
| Some patrons have duplicate records in the Aleph User List. One record contains the MIT ID number and the other one does not. If these patrons are given the Aleph ID number for the record that does not contain the MIT ID number, they will not be able to access Your Account. They will be instructed to visit a circulation desk, where the problem can easily be fixed. |
| The sorting on the brief results display doesn't work properly. You can sort successfully once, but any other attempts will not work. This has been reported to Ex Libris by other customers and we will watch for a solution. |
| Your Account functionality is not available to users who don't have javascript enabled browsers. |
| Sometimes when you hit Clear on the Advanced Search page, not all fields clear (so far one report of this). |
| On the Advanced Search screen it is no longer an option to pre-limit a search by format using a drop-down menu. You have to choose the format (by clicking on the "Search by Physical Format (e.g. CD-ROMs, Maps, ...)" link and then execute the search. This was changed in order to keep our extensive list of format options, but not to introduce javascript into the page. |
| Repeated URLs are showing on several results pages. This is under investigation. |
| In Your Account, under the Holds/RSC requests link, call numbers show with $$h in front of them. This has been reported to Ex Libris and we are awaiting a fix for it. |
| On the Advanced
Search page it is possible to search by a range of years by entering the
years as below in the Year box: 1990->2000 e.g. put a hypen followed by a greater than sign between the years. |
| There is a 20 minute time out on the Web OPAC. This means that the screen will refresh and the browser will pop to the front on your desktop. While very annoying, this time out is necessary for security. Another implication of this is that after 20 minutes of inactivity, the contents on Your Bookshelf and Previous Searches will be wiped out. |
| The Brief Results Display contains javascript errors. This could be very annoying if you have debugging scripts running or if you are listening to music on your PC. We don't have a solution for the javascript errors at the moment, but will keep our eyes open. |
| Changing the password in the Safari browser on the Mac is not working correctly. Recommend using a different browser for changing the password since Safari is not on our recommended browser list. |
| Here's a
weird navigation problem that happens only in Netscape, and not in Internet
Explorer:
1. Do a subject begins with search for "overhead
electric lines" |
| The Books logical base appears to contain records that are not books. This problem is under investigation. |
Fixed things in the no-frames version:
| Fixed 6/12/2003 - When a journal lists 2 URL's and you want to look at one and then the other, it is necessary to close the first journal window in order to get the 2nd journal window to work. |
| Fixed 6/17/2003 by one of our users! - In the browser Opera, the basic search page doesn't work. We are investigating. |
| Fixed 6/19/2003 - The copyright notice on the OPAC screens shows Ex Libris. In a conversation with James Steenbergen, I confirmed that we can change this to MIT since we own the design of the screens. Ex Libris is more concerned with the copyright and integrity of the underlying OPAC code. |
| Fixed 6/20/2003 by Rich- SFX links into Barton weren't working properly. |
| Fixed 6/23/2003 with a hotfix - Punctuation is not appearing in any of our browse lists. It looks like there is a hotfix for this that we will be applying to our server soon. |
| Fixed 6/24/2003 option changed in a table - When all copies of a book are checked out and a user wants to place a hold on one of them through the OPAC, an error message comes up: Item and like copies are not available. Please apply to circulation desk. This problem is under investigation but in the meantime users can contact any circulation to get the hold placed on the item. |
| Fixed 10/11/2003: When renewing books under Your Account, for books that can't be renewed, only the barcode shows instead of the title of the book. We can't change this unfortunately. There has been an enhancement request sent to Ex Libris from the NAAUG Enhancements Working Group. |
| Fixed Sept 2003: At times, when doing a search, a user will get the results of someone else's search in their browser. |
| Fixed Sept 2003: Also in browse searching, if you have a corporate body name, title, subject heading, or conference name that is longer than 36 characters you will not end up close to the right entry in a browse search. For instance, if you do a Browse author search on "Massachusetts Insitute of Technology Artificial Intelligence Laboratory LISP Machine Group" you will be placed at: "Massachusetts Institute of Technology" and will have to page down several times to get to the entry that you want. You can imagine how difficult it gets if you want Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sloan School..... Ex Libris knows about this problem and expects to release a fix for it within the next year. |
The old frames version:
| The Advanced Search page appears to have a bug when trying to use multiple limits on a single search. It appears the problem occurs when the format limit is used in conjunction with one or more other limits. Irrelevant hits appear in the results list. At this time we don't intend to resolve this bug as the problem does not occur in the no-frames OPAC. 3/25/2003 |
| Problems have been reported where nothing but the top or sidebar menus load when an off-campus user wants to use the catalog. This could be due to a firewall problem, particularly Symantec Norton Personal Firewall. When the Firewall is disabled, the catalog will work fine. |
| Foreign language character display - Aleph uses Unicode, a relatively new standard, to encode character sets. Unfortunately this standard is not yet well supported by the browsers. Netscape version 4.x does not display Unicode well. In the older browsers you will see odd string of slashes with numbers (like /018) in the midst of the text. The best browsers for viewing foreign language character sets are Internet Explorer 5.5 and up and Netscape 6.2 and up. |
| Order records may not appear in the appropriate logical bases. For instance order records for journals will not appear in the journals logical base because the order record does not have the 008 field associated with it that is checked for inclusion in a logical base. |
| The order of display of libraries in the availability list is determined by the Library code in the system. Unfortunately this cannot be changed. Ex Libris has mentioned plans to change how this is administered, but no change dates have been forthcoming. |
| There have been complaints about the slowness of the OPAC. The OPAC runs fastest with Internet Explorer. Also, when doing a search that has a journal with many items associated with it, the results and availability pages take a long time to come up. |
| Your Account is not yet active. Renewing, holds and RSC requests will be implemented with the no-frames version in 2003. |
| Printing from the "View Selected" page from Athena does not work. If the user adds them to the Bookshelf, that should print OK. |
| It is not possible to include availability or location information on the Bookshelf. |
| The display of authorities information will improve. The OPAC team will be adding narrower and broader terms to browse lists in the no-frames version in the late summer. |
| Sometimes when doing saves of records to disk or emailing records, especially from the Bookshelf, it stops working. Sometimes clearing the browser cache will fix this problem. |
| The Back button on the Full Record Display does not always work properly (particularly when coming directly from a browse list). This problem should be resolved with the no-frames version in the late summer. |
| The OPAC is not yet compatible with text-only browsers, like Lynx. The no-frames version of the catalog, to be released in late summer, will provide basic functionality for text-only browsers. Ex Libris plans to release a telnet version of ALEPH in late 2002/3. If our no-frames version doesn't satisfy our text browser/former telnet users, then we will look into implementing the telnet version. |
| The catalog will not work without having javascript enabled in the user's browser. Instructions to enable javascript are available at this URL: http://libraries.mit.edu/help/javascript.html |
| If you click on a URL in an email (i.e. from Eudora) and the last browser window you had open was Barton, then your URL will show up in the lower frame with the Barton top navigation bar still visible. This is a characteristic of frames and will be resolved with the implementation of the no-frames version. |
|
The only post-search limit available now is by date. Other limits are possible and will be added at a later date. |
| In the Brief Results Display, after an Author browse search, sort by year is not working. This is a bug and will be fixed by Ex Libris with patch 3/4. |
| When emailing a full record the bibliographic information is partially duplicated in the email. This has been reported as a bug to Ex Libris and will be fixed with patch 3/4. |
| Items filed by articles, a(n), the, etc. - example "The Ideal Cemetery: The Memorial Park" is filed under "the" rather than "ideal". There are a set of incorrectly tagged records, mostly not fully catalogued, that will need to be cleaned up manually. The timeframe for fixing these has not been decided. Precats fall in this group often. Cataloging will be working on making sure the Precats get encoded correctly. |
| When doing a browse search, if you have an exact match your entry will appear 2nd on the list of browse entries. Right now ALEPH does not offer a way to highlight your match or to show where your entry would be if there is no match. The Web OPAC team is pursuing this as an enhancement to the system. |
| Also in browse searching, if you have a corporate body name, title, subject heading, or conference name that is longer than 36 characters you will not end up close to the right entry in a browse search. For instance, if you do a Browse author search on "Massachusetts Insitute of Technology Artificial Intelligence Laboratory LISP Machine Group" you will be placed at: "Massachusetts Institute of Technology" and will have to page down several times to get to the entry that you want. You can imagine how difficult it gets if you want Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sloan School..... Ex Libris knows about this problem and expects to release a fix for it within the next year. |
| Following the journal title changes "continues" and "continued by" on the Full record display is not easily done in the current version of the Web OPAC. It should be better when the no-frames version is released. |
| The way in which we had to set up the Basic and Advanced Search screens means that you cannot cross a set generated from a Basic Search with one generated from an Advanced search. |
| Screen flashing twice when loading - This is a symptom that appear with Netscape version 4.08. This version has also been known to cause the PC to freeze on certain screens. This is a very buggy version of the browser and we recommend that a later version be installed. |
| There is currently no way to see the availability of a particular item without clicking on the location link next to Availability. The North American Aleph Users Group OPAC committee has made this problem its highest priority enhancement request. |
| Order records show on the top of a results list because the default sorting order is descending by date. You can identify order records in two ways: some are entered in all caps, some have a format line that says "Item on order" on the Brief Results Display. |
| "Item on Order" status in Brief Results Display: Currently in the OPAC any item with a BR format (Brief record), the format field in the Brief Results display will show "Item on Order". While order items do make up a large proportion of these, other types of records also get encoded with BR, like government docs, precats, etc. This could be misleading when looking at some records. The OPAC team is working with Kim Maxwell to determine a solution. |
| When printing some pages within the OPAC sometimes information on the far right hand side can be cut off. The OPAC team has made some changes to improve this situation. In the meantime, printing in landscape should allow the information to be captured in a printout. |
| STOP WORDS: set, and, or, not. Set as a stop word is particularly problematic. We have asked Ex Libris to remove "set" as a stop word, but have not heard that they will change it. |
| Font display size on Mac (OS 9.1) with Netscape 4.7 has a problem. User reported problem: "the font does change if you display results of a search and then manually resize the browser window... BUT if you are in the "Full Record" page, it also resorts back to the search summary page (with new smaller font !!!!!!) ". Change font size in Netscape: go to Edit, Preferences... Highlight "fonts" in the left side of the window. Change radio button to point to this choice: "use my fonts, overriding page-specified fonts" Click OK. You can also change his "variable width font" (on the same screen) to size 10 or smaller. (usually the default is 12) After that our Style Sheets won't be applied to the Barton pages (or any page visited). It's a pain to switch this back and forth only for Barton sessions -- we are working on this bug [does not appear on frameless version ] |
| Decimal number browses - SuDocs, Course numbers, call number searches - The system does not sort decimally. That is "1.9" and "19" are interfiled. For an example try the SuDocs search "J 15" or the course number search (in Course Reserves) for "10.1". |
| Searching for R & D in a "Title begins with..." search produces incorrect results. You have to page up to get to the entries that match. |
|
In the expanded title search under the Advanced Browse searches; Identical titles (normalized according to LC and generally-accepted standards for normalization) are not being combined into a single result in a browse listing. Instead records are being undesirably subgrouped according to various title-related criteria: 1. For lack
of a better term, "primary" title fields (i.e., 245, 246, 247,
730, 740) Additionally,
within each of these subgroups another layer of sub-subgroups exist. These
groups are determined by capitalization, the presence of non-alpha-numeric
characters (e.g. comma, square bracket), presence of initial articles
(e.g. for English: A, An, The). Thus, a title is not being normalized
according to LC-established and generally-accepted standards for normalization,
and being presented, accordingly, as a single set of results. Thus, under
a single common title there can be several--even a dozen or more--title
groupings varying only by differences in MARC tag, punctuation, capitalization,
and the presence or absence of an initial article. In the Title browse found on the Basic search screen, this isn't a problem except that capitalized ORDER records appear on a separate line from all of the other titles. |
FIXED ITEMS!
| Direct call number index (CDN) has not been implemented in the production version of the OPAC. The web page displaying direct call number browse listing does not work properly. This bug has been reported to Ex Libris. When this index works the call number display will show both call number and title information. The current call number browse index (LOC) displays only the call numbers. (Jan 2003) |
| Font size on Athena and Macs too small (7/18/01) |
| Cross sets functionality from "Your Previous Searches" link not working (7/24/01) |
| Incorrect "Checked Out" status on some items (7/24/01) |
| Course reserves module not complete (9/01) |
| Z39.50 support coming (8/01) |
| No system down page available (9/01) |
| Parentheses no indexing properly (10/01) |
| Old missing items appearing in OPAC without any holdings information (10/01) |
| Apostrophe's not searching correctly (10/01) |
| Suppressed records appearing the OPAC (10/01) |
| Logical base browse searches not working properly (10/01) |
| ILB brief records appearing the OPAC (10/1) |
| "Serials" limit in the advanced search not working (10/01) |
| CODEN search not working (10/01) |
| Technical report number search not working (10/01) |
| Subtitles not appearing or being searched in browse searches (10/01) |
| Help needed for thesis department and degree searching (1/02) |
| Printing the Your Bookshelf listing cuts off the call number (1/02) |
| Search examples under the Basic search don't work in Internet Explorer (2/02) |
| When emailing records from Barton and a multi-line note with carrige returns or enters is input, the note gets cut off. (9/01?) |
| Delete all on the Bookshelf doesn't work (fixed 3/12/02) |
| 28 day loan without some indication of on shelf status is confusing to our users. The OPAC team is working on a javascript enhancement to improve the display. It should be ready for deployment during the Spring term 2002. (fixed 3/12/02) |
| In the Theses logical base, clicking on an item in the Results list may generate a pop-up screen which says "No documents connected to the access" (10/01). |