Database Logics

Working in a libraries technical services gives me the opportunity to work with several different library products. Today, for instance I'm working with WebBridge which allows our students to link from our catalogue to the various databases we own (so long as they are openURL). I've pretty much gotten the hang of working with it, however I would like to detail my first experience working with the product. Mind you that I had never worked with WebBridge before coming to HCT.

1. Open the WebBridge manual and stare blankly at the pages realising that nothing really makes sense
2. Talk to my supervisor about her experience with WebBridge which basically went like this "yep we loaded the data and it came out in one giant list". (Its not supposed to do that by the way, its supposed to load each database into its own separate "file")
3. Contact AUS and cross our fingers that they can help us.
4. Go to the AUS training and learn that Serial Solutions labels one of the columns "Resources" while WebBridge's Coverage Spreadsheet Conversion Rules labels it "Provider" (*smack* should have thought of that before!!!) as well as a multitude of other things. (thank god for AUS)
   
5. Download the data from Serial Solutions, change the Coverage Spreadsheet Conversion Rules, cross my fingers......and.....hey it actually worked.
6. OK now its time to fire up the WebBridge admin and configure all the origins, resources definitions, filters, categories, etc.
   
7. So now I have everything configured and I go to test it...hey it works again, sort of. The only problem is that Business Source Premier is saying that ABI/Inform has stuff that it really doesn't have.
   
8. OK so at this point I had been using the WebBridge wiki religiously(there is no possible way you could work with WebBridge without it, unless I suppose your Bob Duncan) but what I didn't know is there is a section on loading your data correctly into Millennium (*smack* why didn't I look at that originally!!)
9. OK now I'm rolling, I've cleaned up the excel sheet from SerialSolutions, changed the embargo data, loaded it and...hey it actually works. It only took a month to get it up and running correctly weeeeeeeeee.

So today I'm reloading the data into Millennium, as it has to be done every month or so and I haven't done it in awhile (oops). I also found out today that our links for Student Resource Center no longer work as we gave Gale an ear full last week for the slow load times. They told us the links we were using are old and gave us these new links which makes it load even slower (hahaha how am I not surprised). Regardless the links for WebBridge now have to be changed.

One cool thing that WebBridge does is it tailors its links by what your patrons search for in the catalogue. For instance if my patrons search for something related to health, Just as a side note one thing that I love about WebBridge is that you can tailor your WebBridgeWebBridge will bring up databases related to the health field. Its pretty easy to do as well just add this as your Bool Query in the data tests portion of the WebBridge admin "q,b,c,,,w,R,RZ9999.999," Check out your Millennium manual (page 106470) to see what each letter stands for.