Callisto Upgrade – Jan. 2012

Callisto was upgraded January 8.
Suppression of Brief Events Alerts, Deduplication of Alerts, and Setting your Access Baseline
The major changes in this release work together to significantly improve the relevance of email alerts sent and avoiding information overload. We have done this by redesigning how and when the system sends alerts and allowing customers to control the system sensitivity in new ways. These new settings are viewable and changeable in the Dashboard’s Alertee screens. On-screen documentation there provides details.
Suppression of Brief Events’ Alerts: Those of you who have previously enabled Callisto’s alerts likely realized that many of the changes and problems that your content providers create are short-lived. The majority of events Callisto detects get resolved within a few hours, and quite a few within one hour. It was quite common for problems to be resolved before you even checked your email to see the alert about them. So one of the new features allows you to set the “Minimum Event Duration” for alerts. This is set at “1 Hour” by default, which means that (most types of) events that get resolved in less than one hour will not cause the delivery of an email. Adjust to your preference.
Deduplication: As we’ve gotten more customer sites running with multiple Access Routes monitored by Callisto, we and customers were receiving many alerts for essentially the same thing. For example, if you have 3 networks being monitored by Callisto and a provider mistakenly drops your subscription authorization, you would typically receive 3 emails for the loss, then 3 when it was restored. Now Callisto goes through a process that links those three matching events together and will alert you just once for this situation and it will list all your access routes affected.
Despite all the ways email alerts can now be suppressed, remember the complete list of events is always viewable and searchable in your dashboard “Events” screen.
Set Access Baseline
One of the unique features of Callisto compared to all other library systems is that you do not have to spend significant time loading data or manually tagging which content providers you subscribe to — it figures that out automatically for 95% of the providers. With a recent feature change, we now can run a process we call “Setting your Access Baseline” at any time. After the system has detected your subscription, setting the baseline means recording your current subscription accessibility as the norm against which changes are computed — another feature we’ve developed to make traditional profiling labor unnecessary.
This new process is helpful to customers because surprisingly, we have found it’s more common for libraries to accidentally get temporary free access to subscription resources than it is for them to purchase new subscriptions (Those accidents aren’t usually free trials either). Thus the majority of “New Subscription Access Discovered” types of events that Callisto finds are mistakes that will get resolved by the content providers and need no manual updates/confirmation in Callisto.
Other: Many minor interface improvements and bug fixes were also included in this release.
Stay tuned — our next major upgrade will be an exciting one…