Check your data !

It is important to look and check your data from Alexandria in Excel and in the mapping phase in Alexandria to ensure you are not importing bad data. If you are importing for the first time this year, check to make sure that the student information is correct on a few students that you know or perhaps you might want to go into Chancery to look up a student record and compare it to the information you see on the spreadsheet. If you see a teacher's name with commas in it, be aware of the problem that causes when imported into Alexandria. Names with commas come in with quotation marks. This is a problem because it makes it more tedious to search by teacher name. You must type in the name as it appears. It is fairly easy to fix this before you import the data into Alexandria. Right now this is a known problem in the Chancery report for elementary so you will need to learn how to remove the comma in the teacher field before importing into Alexandria.

The Fix - Highlight the column where you see the teachers' names with commas. Select replace and type in a comma in the find field and leave the replace field blank. Printed directions are online under Librarian's resources>Alexandria>Patron Management.

Chancery and Alexandria

After a few bumps to start school, the Chancery export seems to be going better and certainly better than this time last year. Directions for elementary and secondary have been loaded on the Library Services website you can go directly to them by clicking here.

Keep in mind that Chancery is very particular about the browser that you use. Use Internet Explorer as this is the browser most likely to work well with Chancery.

(1) Make sure that your Pop-up blocker is turned off. To turn off your Pop-Up blocker go to the Tools menu for Internet Explorer and choose turn-off Pop-Up blocker.
(2) Also check your Internet Explorer security settings.
Go to Tools again and choose Internet Options. Click on the security tab and choose custom level. This will allow you to customize some important features in Internet Explorer. Scroll down to the Download section (after Active X Controls and Plugins). Under auto prompting - select enable. Under File download - select enable.

Chancery does not like certain plugins like Google toolbar. If you keep Internet Explorer free of the various plugins, you will have an easier time with getting your Chancery data.

Always check your data. Let us know if you see errors in your report such as wrong lexile scores or teacher names.

Why blog about Alexandria ?

The answer to why blog about Alexandria is to create a central place where we can:





-broadcast messages
-give advice
-issue warnings
-provide help
-trade tips

So now you have two main sources of support for using Alexandria within the school district. One is the Library Services webpage. Most of the information about Alexandria is found at this link.
You will see that this page has been redesigned for this year. We divided the information into 5 smaller sections to make it easier for you to find the instructions you need. Now the 2nd place to look will be this blog. You can subscribe to the blog or go to our webpage and click on the Alexandria Blog link to See what has been posted here.

A second advantage about using a blog to communicate is that all posts are archived. You will be able to search a topic that has been mentioned in the past and locate it more easily. Just search using a key term. Right now there are not many terms to search but the more posts we make, the more searches we can conduct.

The third advantage is that you can comment. So if you have an idea or recommendation related to the posting, you can add your own advice. So feel free to join in.