How to test Evergreen - choosing test patrons and items

The most basic is to have a list of patrons and items. I had my staff pull about 8 names off the Holds shelf. I knew these would have activity on their cards. I also pulled up the accounts we use for Media Repair, Display, etc. These accounts would certainly trigger alerts because they have so many items in "lost" and hence big fines.

The items were just randomly chosen from the shelving cart - as we get more into this we will likely see more useful ones to test.

I printed these numbers up in very large Font and placed by both of the circ desks in very prominent places. This is in the hopes that seeing it will remind the staff to play with evergreen

Evergreen is now locked and loaded - now what?

Evergreen is now on almost all the workstations (called staff clients in evergreen). I put a short cut to it on their desktop plus put it in the Start menu It is a lovely orange circle with a pine tree - prettier than the Horizons blob.

I also put a link to the patron catalog on their toolbar. I called it Evergreen catalog So there are two things staff can explore - the staff OPAC -from the desktop or Start menu and the Patron OPAC from the Internet Explorer tool bar.

I expect staff will just want to try out the staff OPAC but it felt good to have everything up.

"The Missing Manual"

So far this has been the go-to book for me - "The Missing Manual". I printed out a copy of the circ section and am putting it by the circ desk. It's short and to the point. It also has an equally useful section for cataloging.