Some more background on our experiences with these issues and a couple of workarounds for the oversized error messages: A couple of months ago I painstakingly went over a handful of problem records and was pretty convinced the issue manifested when a given record had 70 or more fields. But then that theory broke apart, I think because it also occurs when some fields contain a lot of data. Neither explanation (number of fields or amount of data) makes a lot of sense to me since even with really large records we're talking about a relatively small amount of space/characters/whatever. Additionally, when I first encountered the problem over the summer a librarian at the location where our servers are housed WAS able to add the record, which made me think it was a distance related networking issue. I gather she's since run into the same problem though, which would seem to rule out that theory. Workarounds for the oversized error messages: 1) Alt +F4.
2) On the cataloging network failures Alt+F4 sometimes won’t work, I think because the message requires you to click a box to confirm you got the message before you can close. Here’s a good trick: Click anywhere in the body of the message TAB (Moves cursor to the confirmation box) SPACEBAR (Puts a checkmark in the confirmation box) TAB (Moves cursor to close button) SPACEBAR (Submits close command) >>> "Brian Greene" <bgre...@cgcc.cc.or.us> 10/26/2011 12:09 PM >>> We try a few things: reduce the size of the record until it will save (leaving an incomplete record); ask someone at a different location (i.e. another city) to try saving it and/or try saving it at a later time. Sometimes saving from a different location or waiting until the next morning works, but not consistently. We've thought of a number of possible causes - most recently the inclusion of a 246 field - but I haven't pursued that explanation and the others didn't hold up. I'm not sure about our max_stanza_size, but our system administrator is on this list and can probably provide that info once she sees this thread. Brian >>> Yamil Suarez <ysua...@berklee.edu> 10/26/2011 9:45 AM >>> On Oct 26, 2011, at 12:29 PM, Brian Greene wrote: > Yamil, > > You are not alone - many libraries in the Sage consortium regularly > encounter a network failure when trying to save large bib records. > Likewise, the error message window we get is often too tall for > typical screen resolution. > > Thanks, > Brian > Columbia Gorge Community College Library > Brian, Do you guys have a workaround to save changes to those records? Do you know your max_stanza_size? Thanks in advance, Yamil