These are projects posted by the students of Dr. Gove Allen at Brigham Young University. These students have taken one semester-long course on VBA and generally have had no prior programming experience

Sunday, April 8, 2012

Library Circulation and In-House Report Builder

The BYU library uses software called SirsiDynix to manage their circulation of millions of books. While SirsiDynix has been managing this need very well for the library, one place the software falls short is in the generation of reports. SirsiDynix does have the ability to generate scheduled reports, which the library takes advantage of; however, to this point the reports have not been very flexible.

My client for this project is John Christensen, Dept. Chair of the science library. Because of a background in statistics John fell in to the roll of managing the reports generated by SirsiDynix. There are two areas of data the library administration is really interested in tracking, general circulation and in-house usage. SirsiDynix is used to generate reports of this information on hundreds of call number ranges. While it is nice that SirsiDynix can generate these reports, they are not very well formatted and there is a lot of unnecessary information in them. For the past several years, once a month John takes half a day to filter through over 60 unformatted txt reports, extract the information needed and add it to two yearly summary reports.

For my project, I added tools to John’s excel report to automate the entire process. Through the ribbon John can now launch a user form that allows him to select and view information about the reports he intends to import. Once he has verified the correct reports he can then chose which month he is dealing with and launch the upload. The entire process takes a job that used to require 5 hours a month and obtains the same results (in fact more accurate in some cases!) in just a couple minutes.




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