Continuation of Jed Moffitt's pre-launch updates for staff at KCLS. 

Attached is the sixth update in this series...

Dear KCLS Staff:

Before diving into this memo, I thought I'd bounce around the Internet for a minute or two to get some different takes on the fabled dual idioms of "positive" stress and "negative" stress.  Sure, it would be interesting to know the difference as an academic exercise, but more to the point, I want to get a second opinion on what I'm feeling with Evergreen week only a week away.

I didn't look very hard, and pretty much just ran into alot of squishy definitions.

If I'd wanted a good answer, I probably should have asked a librarian.

Best I can tell.  Positive stress is when you are excited, challenged, and energized by an endeavor even though it may be big and difficult.  Actually...I stopped my research there.  I don't really want to know what negative stress is at this point.  It’s not really an option. 

I will admit that the Evergreen "stress test" last Thursday was certainly exciting.  I should pause here and thank you all again very much for your participation.  We had 1,789 "Logins" by KCLS staff between 8 and 10:30.  (Certainly all of us who participated logged in multiple times--still that was a good number.  Definitely the type of participation we'd hoped for).

We learned alot, and I'll give you an overview of some of the insight gained in the attached memo.  The bottom line is that we saw alot of really good things, and alot of errors, but we didn't see anything in the test to indicate that we can't achieve a good and reliable critical mass of system functionality needed for a successful go-live experience in the libraries (for which our best estimate right now is mid-day Thursday, September 23rd).

In fact, it was such an insightful and productive couple of hours that we're going to go-around one more time and do another stress test of Evergreen this coming Thursday from 8 to 10 in the morning.  Information is already starting to circulate about this event and you'll hear more details through your Cluster and Site managers.

So thanks again for your participation and support, and we'll look forward to building on what we learned last week with two more hours of Evergreen dress-rehearsal this coming Thursday.  I hope we break-a-leg (only in the theatrical sense).

Sincerely,
Jed