WorldShare Acquisitions Release Notes - August 1st and 8th, 2021

Administrative actions

These items require immediate action or decisions.

Follow-up actions

In an effort to keep your staff informed of new features and changes, you may also want to consider these items.

Performance Improvements for WorldShare Acquisitions

You will now see faster response times across all of the WorldShare Acquisitions module.  These performance improvements will vary in impact based on the library and the nature of the data, but preliminary testing has indicated performance improvements of 2x to 5x the speed currently.  These faster response times are due to the use of a new database software. Unfortunately, other acquisitions-related modules, such as serials management (Serials) and vendor management (Vendors), are not impacted at this time, but they may be switched over to this new technology in the future.  Additionally, the Discover Items and Discover Collections menu items will not be impacted, because these do not belong to Acquisitions but are components of WorldCat and Collection Manager respectively.

Because the change was an underlying technology behind the whole Acquisitions system, you should see faster response times on every page within Acquisitions.  This includes, but is not limited to:

• Searching local resources
• Searching orders
• Searching order item
• Creating orders
• Editing orders
• Editing order items
• Searching invoices
• Searching invoice items
• Recepción y facturación de artículos
• Editing invoices
• Viewing budgets

However, you may notice improvements more on some pages than others.  This is because the longer a page took to load before, the more potential for time savings there are in the future.  In other words, the longer the page took to load previously, the more noticeable the performance improvements now are likely to be. Related to this, pages that were already loading in sub-second times may not appear to improve as much.  

Additionally, libraries that are searching across more Acquisitions data (orders, order items, invoices, invoice items, funds) may experience more significant time savings overall.  In general, the more data the system has to search across the longer the search times are going to be.  Therefore, the more data an institution has the more time savings are possible.  However, all institutions should see performance improvements across the system.

Lastly, the more complex a search is the more likely you are to notice improvements.  For example, an order item keyword search (which is a "contains" search across many different fields) is a very complex search and often can take a while.  Because of this, performance improvements may be more noticeable with these more complex search queries.  

Some searches are now case sensitive

Some searches, which were previously not case sensitive, are now case sensitive. For example:

• Local resources search
  • Descripción
• Order item search
  • Código del fondo
  • KB collection identifier
• Receive and invoice search
  • Copy number
• Invoice items search
  • Código del fondo
  • Payment reference ID
  • Invoice item number 
  • Order item number

Some of these problems have already been fixed and will be released in late August.  A few others are being analyzed now for feasibility.

Adding local resource items to an invoice is now case sensitive

When adding a local resource invoice item to an invoice, you must now search for local resources using a case-sensitive auto-complete menu.  Previously, when you searched for local resources to add to an invoice, the system would display possible local resources based on a search that was NOT case sensitive (e.g. a search for taxes and TAXES would return the same local resource).  Now the system is conducting a case-sensitive search, so that if you search for a version of the local resource with a different case it will not return that local resource in the results of the auto-complete.  For example, let's say you try to add a local resource invoice item called "taxes" and there is a local resource called "TAXES", the system will not display to you the uppercase "TAXES" local resource and will instead ask you to create a new local resource called "taxes."  After you do, however, the system will detect you are attempting to create an invoice item with a duplicate local resource on the invoice and will display an error saying that the invoice item could not be created.  You will need to then add the local resource invoice item again, this time searching for the word(s) with the correct case.  This problem is already fixed and will be released in late August.

Support website(s)

Support information for this product and related products can be found at:

• Adquisiciones de WorldShare
• Comuníquese con el servicio de soporte de OCLC
• Centro comunitario de OCLC
• Browser compatibility chart