OCLC Oddments: Resource Sharing Issues

Two recent announcements of concern to members from the OCLC Resource Sharing List:

[From Monday, July 10]: OCLC regrets to inform users of ILLiad, Clio and additional third-party services that use Web services to communicate with OCLC Resource Sharing, that attempts [sic] the following actions receive an error message: "An unknown error occurred...."

* Attempting to update to update requests to received
* Responding "no" to a Conditional
* Delete a request associated with a conditionalized response
* Updating of Lending requests to 'Shipped'
* Updating Borrowing requests to 'Returned'
Additional actions may result in the error message as well.

OCLC is blocking the attempts to update these requests. Each discrete request may fail multiple times, as each update is performed. A fix is planned for approximately 11:00 pm Eastern time Tuesday, July 11. The next attempted update following this fix will update these requests properly.

If a request subject to the error message above must be processed before the fix is installed, users may do so through WorldCat Resource Sharing at http://firstsearch.oclc.org.

We apologize for any inconvenience and confusion this problem is causing our users.

[From Tuesday, July 11]: Due to problems updating requests (as outlined below and distributed Monday, July 10, 2006), OCLC will be treating today, Tuesday, July 11, as a non-referral day to allow our users an extra day to handle requests.

We apologize again for the inconvenience and confusion that this is causing our users.

SUBJECTS: OCLC ODDMENTS

CFLC Chronicles: CFLC Nametags

Attention workshop participants who find yourselves in a session sans CFLC-generated nametag for some reason: the bar has now been set for filling out your own! Seriously cool, Nathan!

SUBJECTS: CFLC CHRONICLES

Tuesday's Tool: Portals to the World

If you or your patrons need reliable, categorized information about or from a country, Portals to the World from the Library of Congress may well be your answer.

Portals to the World contains selective links providing authoritative, in-depth information about the nations and other areas of the world. They are arranged by country or area with the links for each sorted into a wide range of broad categories. The links were selected by Area Specialists and other Library staff using Library of Congress selection criteria.

Links lead to Web sites (many of which are bilingual) both from and about the selected nation. While the structure of the entries varies, the entries themselves typically begin with general information and proceed to business, culture, education, geography, government, search engines, society, and much, much more.

The more detailed profiles from the Library of Congress Country Studies series (intended to "focus primarily on lesser-known areas of the world or regions in which U.S. forces might be deployed") are also referenced within each entry whenever one exists.

SUBJECTS: REFERENCE RICHES