We are planning our migration to Sierra for Monday, June 3rd, 2013. There will be a one day downtime to accomplish this migration. Thank you for your patience!
Sierra gives libraries that want to delve more deeply into the data structures of their systems the means to accomplish their goals. Sierra’s technical backbone has been modernized and is very different from Millennium. In Sierra, a user can execute SQL queries on the database directly, rather than looking at records only in the desktop application. In short, the library can search and refine sets of data from the database in ways they could not do before. The foundation of the Sierra Services Platform is a PostgreSQL relational database which captures all of the material, circulation, patron, financial, and other operational data of the library. This standard means a knowledge of the SQL query language is enough to get started.
Data in the library’s system are now available for querying, such as patron transaction information, financial information, and content of various kinds. This opens up a new world for sophisticated searching. For example, in addition to “asking” for basic hold information, the user can find out who placed the hold, when it was placed, if the hold was frozen. Another example is fines: users can immediately tell, for example, which patrons have fines over a given amount.
