ResourceMate®

ResourceMate® News

2014 has been an exciting year at ResourceMate®. Our release of the ResourceMate® Reading Program Service has been very well received. We continue to move forward in the advancement of ResourceMate® as a more mature product.

Make sure you take advantage of our first ever Holiday Sale.

We always welcome your feedback and appreciate your support of ResourceMate®. You have helped make ResourceMate what it is today.

Brian Watson
President, Jaywil Software

December brings us to the end of 2014 and ushers in a season full of promise and new beginnings. We celebrate many wonderful days this month with our customers from all over the world.

National Poinsettia Day

Happy Poinsettia Day! - December 12

A date this month that may not be as familiar to most is National Poinsettia Day, celebrated on December 12th. The date marks the passing of Joel Roberts Poinsett, a doctor and soldier by trade as well as an amateur botanist, who sent clippings of the beautiful plant to America on a visit as the first United States Ambassador to Mexico in 1828.

While considered by the ancient Aztecs to be symbols of purity, in today's language of flowers, red, white, or pink poinsettias, the December birth flower, symbolizes good cheer and success and are said to bring wishes of mirth and celebration. And, that is what we wish for all of you this holiday season.


This Time:


ResourceMate® Holiday Sale

Our holiday sale is from Nov 28, 2014 to Jan 2, 2015 and means that you will save 15% on your order! This offer applies to all orders, and remember, ResourceMate® makes a great gift this holiday season for any collector on your gift list. For more information about the Holiday Sale please contact us at info@resourcemate.com or call us at 1-800-815-8370.

15% Off Sale

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What's New...

ResourceMate® Reading Service Program

We are excited to announce our ResourceMate® Reading Program Service! This service provides instant access to Lexile Framework for Reading, Accelerated Reader, and Scholastic Reading Counts with ResourceMate® Extended and Premium when Support is active.

The Reading Program Service includes:

  • Automatic retrieval of Lexile, Accelerated Reader, and Scholastic Reading Counts information.
  • Quickly process all existing items to retrieve the reading level information. No need to export your data to have your items processed!
  • Extended use of ISBN retrieval so that it will also search the Lexile, AR, and SRC databases if an ISBN cannot be found on the sources you've selected.
  • Teachers and students will benefit with having OPAC options to search by Lexile, AR, and SRC information to find suitable materials.

You will save valuable time with this instant retrieval service! Other benefits of the extended version are: 20,000 item capacity, textbook management, circulation rules and restrictions, patron groups, and an audit trail of who made what changes to your collection.

You can find more information and watch a brief video about our new Reading Program Service on our website.

Online Training Sessions

Our Level 1 Online Training Session is intended to show new users the program, how to do all of the basic procedures, as well as show many of the features and capabilities of ResourceMate®.

The next Level 1 Training Session will be on December 17, 2014 from 12-4pm, EST.

Our Level 2 Online Training Session is for those users who are proficient with the basics of ResourceMate® and/or for those who wish to learn more about the features in the Extended and Premium versions.

The next Level 2 Training Session will be on January 30, 2015 from 12-4 pm, EST.

Please visit our website for more information about our Level 1 Online Training and Level 2 Online Training sessions, as well as our 2015 schedule.

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Spotlight On ...

We are excited to announce that we have reached our 10,000th registered ResourceMate® user!

Temple Beth Or Library

Temple Beth Or Library

Temple Beth Or is located in Everett, WA and has approximately 130 families in the congregation. The library has about 2,500 volumes and includes all kinds of Jewish books and resources including DVDs, CDs, manuscripts, and sheet music. They heard about ResourceMate® from another synagogue in California who uses the same type of cataloguing and classification system. Carolyn Henri has recently stepped into a leadership position in the library committee, and is committed to getting the library up and running.

Our library has always been active, and it includes a children's library and a main library. We were using a card system where people would write their names on their circulation cards, and so on. Our long term vision is to set up barcodes for checking items in and out, and having a circulation desk. We have a pretty active website for our congregation, and would like our membership to be able to see what is in the library and if it is available. We have 8 volunteers that provide our library team with extensive Jewish knowledge and varying interests in books.

One aspect of ResourceMate® that I appreciate is the volunteer ability to use security logins with specific permissions, and then the library administrator can have access to everything. Your developers have been very responsive, and helped with getting our data into the database. We haven't used the program extensively yet, as we are concentrating on cataloguing our items, but it seems very user friendly, intuitive and practical.

Their goal is to have the library up and running by January 2015, and we wish them luck in their endeavor!

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The First ResourceMate® Customer — Bea Lithgow

Reaching our 10,000th registered user has made us reflect on our very first registered user, Bea Lithgow from Ontario, Canada. In 1992, Bea started to research library automation software programs for her church, Peterborough Free Methodist Church and heard about ResourceMate® from the Church Library Association of Ontario, an association that she is still a member of today. ResourceMate® was still in a very early development stage, and the developer greatly appreciated her input and librarian expertise. Since that time, Bea has moved cities and libraries and has brought ResourceMate® with her all along the way. She started with our original version of 2.0 and has upgraded along with us and is currently using ResourceMate® Essential Plus at Huron Park Baptist Church in Woodstock, Ontario.

The church library has approximately 4,000 items, including DVDs, books, CDs, and study kits that include several different types of resources. Bea started working in libraries in 1970, when her daughter volunteered her to help with the school library.

I committed to work in the library for a year, and started my librarian training. My family moved the next year, and there happened to be an opening at the public library at the children's department. I applied for the job and got it. I loved the work and found it very interesting, and I still enjoy it to this day.

When we started at Huron Park Baptist Church the library volunteer team was already set up. Today, we have 9 volunteers that includes a 9yr old and a teenager. I'm a firm believer in organizing the library as if it were a public library, with dewey decimal classification and organization. Even if you start small, the easier it will be to control as it grows larger, so you might as well start with being organized.

The pastors love the library, they bring their books to be catalogued and to be kept organized. We know where the items are now, if it is checked out, on the shelves, etc. If you want to find things, you know where they are. And then, because of that, people come in to the library more.

One of my favorite features of the program is the patron search (OPAC) screen. It's the best thing since sliced bread! It's so easy to use and find items. I love searching by keyword. It works the same as the public library, your developers have done a great job!

Something I highly recommend to everyone is to create regular backup files of your data. I have the volunteers back up every week, and I also go in once a week to create my own backup on my flash drive.

I'm thankful for the support team at Jaywil who is always there to help, and I have found the program easy to use and have always promoted it to other organizations.

We really appreciate Bea Lithgow and the way she has supported and promoted ResourceMate® for over 20 years!

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Technical Tip from Bob George

Managing Circulation Activities Through the Holidays

ResourceMate® users are located around the globe and they all have different holiday schedules. As we approach the many celebrations of this season there are a lot of variation in the days or time periods when the library is closed for holidays.

Many librarians have a schedule for creating reports of Overdue Items and for using Mail Out Reminders to patrons with items that are overdue. Holidays play some havoc with these schedules and it is important that you don't send out a reminder to someone who was expected to return an item when the library is closed.

The first rule is that the Expected Back Date will always be defaulted to the check-out period specified in the Resource Type settings (under the File menu, Resource Types) unless you make adjustments elsewhere in the program.

Expected Back Date Overrides

Override Expected Back for a Session

At some point in time, the Expected Back Date will land on a holiday date. If you are dealing with a single day for the holiday then you can use the "Override Expected Back:" drop down located to the far right of the "Check-Out Date:" field on the Patron Activities Check Out tab. You should note that this override will affect the expected back date for all Resource Types. So if you are normally checking out books and then come to a DVD that has a different Check-Out Period then you may need to clear the Override field for the transaction on that one item and then reset when you start checking out books again.

For schools this is also a handy field, when a holiday period of a week arrives. You may then want to set the "Override Expected Back:" date to the beginning of the New Year so that students can have the items checked out for the holiday period. Please note that the "Override Expected Back:" field will need to be established for each ResourceMate® session.

Latest Expected Back Date (ResourceMate® Extended or Premium)

ResourceMate® also has another feature that sets the "Latest Expected Back Date". This field is great for the librarian that wants to ensure that all of the items are back in the library by a specific date. Sometimes, the library inventory process may be taken over the Christmas Holidays or at the end of the academic year. For users of ResourceMate® Extended and Premium systems, a preference can be set to ensure that items do not get a check out date later than a specific date.

By Selecting Utilities/General Settings (left side)/Access Patron Activity Preference (right side), you will get a new window that will allow you to change preference settings. Click on the Check Out tab and set the "Latest Expected Back Date:" date. Now whenever you check out items, the Expected Back Date will not go beyond the date that you have set here. ResourceMate® will remember this setting between sessions.

Changing the Circulation Transaction Expected Back Date

It is possible that someone may forget to set the "Override Expected Back:" date and it's now time to create a report of Items that are overdue or a Mail Out Reminder report. Let's suppose that it is now the day following a holiday period. If an item had an expected back date that fell on the holiday, then those items will be flagged as overdue even though the patron could not return the item because of the holiday.

ResourceMate® has a solution for this problem. You can Select Utilities/Change Expected Back Dates Utility. This utility will ask you to identify an expected back date and then it will tell you if there are any items that will be affected by a change in the expected back date. You can then select a new expected back date for those checked out items based on a drop down calendar and then click OK to process the change.

Now when you run the listing reports for overdue items or Mail Out Reminders the items changed above will no longer be overdue.

Holidays for Excluding Fines

Charging a fine for items that are being returned late is a way of raising funds for the library and a way of encouraging patrons to return items on time. ResourceMate® Extended and Premium systems have the capability of not charging fines for dates that are classified as holidays. These holidays can come in a couple of different formats.

Some libraries will decide that specified days of the week will be fine free. Some libraries might choose Friday and Saturday as being fine free. Other libraries such as schools libraries may choose not to charge fines on weekends. Other organizations may decide that there are specific days of the year for which they do not want to charge fines for overdue items. Examples of this might be New Year's Day or a set of sectarian holidays.

By Selecting Circulation/Extended Circulation/Holidays you can check the appropriate boxes for the days of the week for which you do not wish to charge fines for overdue items. You can enter this schedule of holidays for an entire year or more at a time.

As you approach the holidays in your region of the world, I hope that the above information will help you plan the use of circulation features that are available in ResourceMate®.

Happy Holidays,
Bob George

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Jaywil Software Development Inc.
100 Crimea St. Unit B7 Guelph, ON, Canada N1H 2Y6
North American Sales, Support & Information 1-800-815-8370 Phone 519-837-8370 Fax 519-837-8656

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