Time zone change to UTC-07:00) Pacitific Time (British Columbia)

Sierra, Millennium & Encore
1

Hi everyone,

Sorry for the mass email for such an isolated topic, but I am working on an issue with Innovative and have hit a dead-end. British Columbia (in Canada) changed their time zone on November 1st.
So we no longer “set the time zone automatically” and have changed to PCT time.

I did not know this, but the Sierra Fines Paid Report query is based on the time zone of your PC/device. Not the Sierra timestamp.

So, we have some stations that have adopted the time change as expected and the Fines Paid report is correct. Some other stations are not correct, so the Fines Paid report is not correct.

There doesn’t seem to be a rationale for this. Even in 1 branch there are some with/without the error.

I have tried:

  • rebooting several times
  • changing the time zone to something “else” and then changing it back.
  • updating the time zone in Microsoft

Does anyone have any ideas that we could try?
I did see that our circulation transaction history timestamps did not update, but the timestamps in Sierra did.

Thanks,
Elizabeth Wright, MLIS

Vancouver Island Regional Library

2

Elizabeth, have you tried using the time zone PT, PDT or PST, whichever one is equivalent to PCT?  I’m on Eastern Time and am unfamiliar with your particular time zone options, but I never heard of PCT until your post.

3

Hi Bob,
This is a new time zone. We have tried some UTC time zones that are equivalent, but they didn’t work either…
Thanks,
Elizabeth

From: Bob Gaydos webguru@innovativeusers.org
Sent: Tuesday, November 3, 2026 12:34 PM
To: Elizabeth Wright ewright@virl.bc.ca
Subject: IUG Forums: Time zone change to UTC-07:00) Pacitific Time (British Columbia)

Someone replied to a topic you are Watching.


Bob Gaydos bgaydos Sierra
November 3

Elizabeth, have you tried using the time zone PT, PDT or PST, whichever one is equivalent to PCT? I’m on Eastern Time and am unfamiliar with your particular time zone options, but I never heard of PCT until your post.

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Elizabeth Wright ewright
November 3

Hi everyone,

Sorry for the mass email for such an isolated topic, but I am working on an issue with Innovative and have hit a dead-end. British Columbia (in Canada) changed their time zone on November 1st.
So we no longer “set the time zone automatically” and have changed to PCT time.

I did not know this, but the Sierra Fines Paid Report query is based on the time zone of your PC/device. Not the Sierra timestamp.

So, we have some stations that have adopted the time change as expected and the Fines Paid report is correct. Some other stations are not correct, so the Fines Paid report is not correct.

There doesn’t seem to be a rationale for this. Even in 1 branch there are some with/without the error.

I have tried:

  • rebooting several times
  • changing the time zone to something “else” and then changing it back.
  • updating the time zone in Microsoft

Does anyone have any ideas that we could try?
I did see that our circulation transaction history timestamps did not update, but the timestamps in Sierra did.

Thanks,
Elizabeth Wright, MLIS

Vancouver Island Regional Library

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4

I can’t comment on the fines paid issue specifically, but did you make changes to the servers (or have Innovative do it? They not only need to change the server time zone but I think there is a java related update they need to do as well and a postgres one. We are not hosted but we had our IT patch the server to ensure all the latest packages were there and then Innovative made some further changes. I’m not exactly sure what. But if you want to give them a reference our ticket # is 10840043 and the person who worked on our case was named Algy Tham, but they are not even close to being in our time zone (they didn’t say where specifically). I heard rumours from someone maybe it was at BC IUG that Sierra Web wasn’t working as expected. Could that be an issue? Also I don’t know what version of Java all your workstations are using, but I found that while one of the Sierra upgrades changed the version for new installs to 11.0.17 it didn’t change the existing versions from 1.8.0_45. So out of an abundance of caution I changed all these prior to the time zone change. You don’t need to do a complete install. You just need to clear the jar cache, exit Sierra. Copy the jre directory from another machine (for us it goes to C:\Sierra Desktop App\jre\11.0.17) and I would back up the existing iiirunner.lax file (just in case) and copy that from the same machine as well. I’m assuming you are on a somewhat recent version of Sierra. We are still on 6.5 but that has the java change. Also we currently have our Windows 11 machines set to Yukon time because MS was a bit behind with some updates and that hasn’t caused us any issues that I’ve noticed. I hope you get it all sorted! Julie