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Home > Minerva > Circulation > Millennium Offline Circulation

Millennium Offline Circulation

What happens when telecommunications fail? Grinding of teeth and pulling of hair are usually followed by the distributions of pencils and note paper on which to manually record transactions until the network stabilizes. Welcome to the brave new world of telecommunications.

While it may not seem that way all the time, what with the virus and worm road bumps that have upset network traffic repeatedly in recent months, great strides have been made in underlying expansion of bandwidth and improvements in the routine elements of maintaining connections. We are still, however, far absolute 100% uptime, all the time guarantees.

The Millennium Offline Circulation module is available as a stopgap more convenient than pencil and paper. It allows one to capture checkout, checkin, renewal and patron registration transactions electronically and, as soon as the connection is back, upload them into Minerva.

The Offline Circulation software can be downloaded here.

Every Minerva site should have the ID and password for this site.  If you cannot lay hands on it, contact InfoNet staff.

The online manual at http://minerva.maine.edu/manual contains information on use of the software package. Start at entry #100138.

Setup

  1. Download and run the software (offlinecirc160_02.exe as of October, 2010). This is a self-extracting executable install program. When asked for the server domain name/IP address enter minerva.maine.edu .
  2. Start the program and select View... Preferences from the pulldown menus.
  3. Enter your Statistics Group number. (If you skip this step you will not see offline transactions in your regular circulation reports.)
  4. If you do not use the standard 14-digit barcodes for you patrons, uncheck the "check barcode validity" option.
  5. If you will be registering new patrons while the online system is down, you will need to define Patron Registration Settings. The tags and typical prompts are shown below.  You can vary the order and modify the prompts, but the tags always mean the same. You should enter the most common values for patron type and patron statistical code.

b Barcode
n Name (lastname, firstname)
a Primary address
t Primary phone
z Email address
h Secondary address
p Secondary phone
0 (zero) Patron type

Include one, but not both of these, based on whether your patron statistical codes are stored in Pcode3 or Pcode4:
3 Pcode3
8 Pcode4

Using Offline Circ

  1. Complete directions for
  2. Remember that each machine running Millennium Offline Circ is independent in terms of Preference settings, transactions captured, and uploading of transactions.  If you are using multiple machines, be sure their settings are identical.
  3. The program inserts a "b" at the beginning of every line where you are expected to scan a barcode. Do NOT delete the "b". Enter the barcode after it.
  4. After you are back online, transactions from each circ machine must be uploaded to the server using the File...Upload option of Millennium Off Line Circ. When asked if the server is ready, say YES. When asked whether to erase transactions, say NO. This gives you a second try if something goes wrong with the initial upload. Once you have confirmed that the upload was successful, you MUST come back to File... Erase and get rid of the transaction to make the software ready for a future use.
  5. Once you have uploaded transactions from one or more machines running Offline Circulation, you need to process them in the Millennium circulation module. Click on the offline file processing button (left menu) and the click process all files. If there were any problems with the upload, you will be offered the chance to view a list of error messages. Contact InfoNet staff if you have questions about error messages.
  6. Check a couple sample transactions to be sure that they were applied properly. If they were, go back to Offline Circ and select File... Erase to delete the item and patron transactions just uploaded and clear the decks for the next time the program must be used.
  7. If you have questions or problems, please open a ticket at http://support.maineinfonet.org/ right away. Indeed, depending on the permissions of the person attempting to accomplish step #4, it may be necessary to request support to do that step.