Of chairs and Alice and other hard things... (Guest Entry)

Greetings from the other half of the Wheaton librarians' great Kenyan adventure.
I am writing this while sitting on the hardest of the many hard Kenyan chairs that I have experienced in my week here. At least this one makes no pretense of padding; it is merely a sheet of flat board bolted to the frame of the chair.
The office type chairs I have used in the library have been more of a tease-they look like they should be padded, but then you sit down and all the air foops out of the padding and you are merely sitting on hard wood again. This may not seem like a huge deal to many of you, but one needs some basic comforts (let alone ergenomics, which clearly haven't reached Kenya) in order to deal with Alice for long stretches of time.
Ah, Alice. David has given an introduction to this system, so I will merely share my impressions. In my estimation, Alice is to Voyager (the online catalog that Wheaton uses) as the donkey carts one sees on the roads here are to the rough and ready vehicles that people drive on the terrible, potholey roads. Alice is like the donkey cart in that it has few options, runs sporadically, and often is temperamental. So far, some basic cataloging functions like adding multiple volumes to one bibliographic record appear to be impossible. For those of you who are interested in cataloging, imagine importing the same record for the Encyclopedia Brittanica 20 times (or however many books are in the set), then editing the descriptive information for the individual volumes, all merely because the function that allows you to add copies to a bibliographic record won't permit one to do volumes. We do hope to find a way around this, and many other Alice "issues," in order to leave our Kenyan friends with a more functional and user-friendly online catalog.
Mary Sue