Below is an e-mail from Doug describing the status of the label printing program. Sorry for the duplication for some of you.

Doug said Winston is working on the diacritics issue and said Winston gave the impression that the programming can be done so that diacritics will display on the spine labels. Doug expects that the label printing program will be ready very soon (i.e., within a couple of days or so, but per his note maybe a little longer for Health and Law).

How 'bout that? Some good news!

Betsy

-----Original Message-----
From: Douglas Smith
Sent: Thursday, July 08, 2004 11:43 AM
To: Michele Crump; Lawan Orser; Cecilia Botero - HCL; Jean Bostwick - LL; Daniel Crisman - LL; Jennifer Farrington; Lisa Ege; Michele Wilbanks-Fox; Christine Driver; Betsy Simpson
Cc: Martha Hruska; Winston Harris; Chris Nicolich
Subject: Progress report on ALEPH label printing

Sorry for the long delay in updating you on the latest advances in ALEPH label printing. Winston Harris and Chris Nicolich in Systems have just about perfected the new spine label printing program. On Wednesday of this week we tested the latest version. We are now able to generate line breaks for all forms of punctuation (except periods which will print), spaces, parentheses and brackets and combinations of the preceding. The various characters triggering line breaks will not themselves print of course. Please note that I am only referring to text in the description field of the item record, the only location from which information is drawn to generate call number labels.

When in parentheses, alpha characters without numerals will be ignored and will not print on labels; however, the presence of at least one numeral within the parentheses will cause all of the text in parentheses to print. It is important to be aware of this, especially when printing labels for older, pre-STP material. A couple of nifty features have been added. We can now open a text box which will allow us to edit a call number and save it to the text file to be printed. Also, there is now a delete button which allows us to delete an item from the file that we do not want to print.

As with the old NOTIS label program there is an 8 line limit and an 8 to 9 character limit per line, not sure yet which limit will hold for the final version.

For those of you in Law and Health there may be a little more delay because Systems will have to create an installation program to be sent to those sites. Branch libraries will be able to load the program on their own from one of the library servers.

Lastly, I just want to thank Winston and Chris for all of the time and energy they have invested in this project. While I am sure it has been an enormous pleasure for them to work with us, their patience and perseverance are appreciated.

Doug

Doug Smith
Head, Copy Cataloging
Resource Services Department
George A. Smathers Libraries
University of Florida