New UR Libraries Beta Website
June 19, 2009
This week we announced the public preview of our new website. We also posted a link to the current site alerting visitors to visit the new site and give it a test drive. This project has been a collaboration between staff from the library, the UR communications office and web development group. It officially began with our first planning meeting in October 2008, and we’re very happy to be at this point. The key features we’re implementing include a persistent search box which is in the site header allowing users to search our resources (catalog, journal subscriptions, databases, research and course guides, and site) from any page they happen to be on. Beside the search box is a link to launch a pop-up chat window allowing the user to continue using our site while getting live assistance. There’s also a standard navigation bar which is part of the header allowing for consistent navigation from every page on the site. We still have much to do and numerous refinements to add but I believe we’re off to a great start. Another part of the redesign is our transition to UR’s new content management system, Cascade Server from Hannon Hill. It’s a major improvement over our current CMS. It creates very clean code and is much more flexible for future changes and development.
We have also licensed LibGuides from Springshare for our subject/major and course specific guides. LibGuides is a hosted service and lets you build incredibly focused guides for your users. There are some libraries that use LibGuides to host their entire website, which shows you how flexible the product is. LibGuides is also easily customized by using custom cascading style sheets and we’ve been able to apply our new site’s template so that it fully blends with the rest of our new site.
You can preview our beta site at http://xlibrary.richmond.edu and I’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions! The site will stay in beta until early August when we’ll retire the current site.
Moo Minicards For Your Library
March 5, 2009
During the fall semester I created a Flickr account for our library to host photos of the library as well as pictures taken at our various events throughout the year. When I received approval to purchase a Flickr Pro account, we were offered 10 free MiniCards from Moo.com, a Flickr partner located in the UK. Moo is an online printing service and will put your photos on about anything you desire. One of their more popular products are their MiniCards. They are smaller than a business card, but large enough to display a photo on one side, and custom text on the other. I decided to create some sample cards to advertise our library contact information, website and catalog. After sharing the samples with various groups, we ordered a set of 100 MiniCards. We placed them on our Main Service Desk along with our staff business cards. We set them out in mid-January and they quickly disappeared over the course of a few weeks. Are they necessary for the library to function? No. Will our students and faculty forget about us? No. Can they remind interested users how to get in touch with us as well as generate lots of “good will?” Absolutely! Below are photos of the front and back of our cards. A set of 100 MiniCards only costs $19.99 plus a small amount for shipping.
New SelfCheck Machine for Boatwright
October 22, 2008
We recently “recycled” our 3M Model 6210 SelfCheck unit (old and busted) in order to prepare for the arrival of the new V Series unit (new hotness). Our Circulation Supervisor worked hard with 3M support and other staff to get the new one up and running as there was a snafu with our ILS vendor, but that has been resolved and we’re up and running. The old one was running Win95. The new one is on Vista. The old one required a keyboard and mouse to be connected anytime you wanted to update settings, etc. The new one has a web interface we access via IP address. The new one is also much less industrial looking. What we need to focus on now is boosting its use as the old one was only able to garner around 8% of our total circulation volume.
LITA 2008 - 5 Minute Madness Videos Online
October 21, 2008
I attended LITA 2008 which started on Oct. 17 and finished this past Sunday (Oct. 19). One of my favorite sessions was the 5 Minute Madness presentation on Saturday morning. Each presenter was restricted to 5 minutes to discuss a topic of their choosing with as many slides as they could squeeze in. I had originally planned on video recording my former co-worker Keith Weimer, but decided to capture the whole session due to the broad range of topics. I’ve processed the videos and have uploaded them to a YouTube playlist. I’m embedding the full playlist below but will also link directly to the list on YouTube. There are a lot of good sessions, so take a few minutes and watch some of the clips. You can also head over to the Eclectic Librarian for some brief coverage of each topic.
Full embedded playlist (mouse over to move between clips):
or:
Playlist - http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=A1F2683346CC7224
Jim Rettig’s Travel Schedule for 2008/2009
May 21, 2008
My director, Jim Rettig, is currently the President-elect of the American Library Association. I had the idea of creating a mashup of his travel itinerary for the year to help the library community visualize where he’ll be appearing over the course of the next year. The result is below.
Here’s a link to the full version on Google Maps: http://snurl.com/29z6i
To accomplish this, I created a dedicated calendar in Google Calendar, fed the xml data from the calendar into a custom Yahoo! Pipe, and then exported the KML data back to Google Maps.
Props to the team at Lifehacker for picking up on a post of how to do this!
Need Online Storage for Library Users? Try drop.io!
November 14, 2007
A new online storage service, http://drop.io, launched recently and allows users to store up to 100mb of files. Yeah, it’s stingy storage, but great for office docs, a few images, an occasional audio file, etc. The benefits: no registration so you’re privacy is intact (as much as you want to believe that), multiple users can share the space, you can set a deletion date, users can add notes and make changes, etc.
I can really see this being beneficial to library users visit the library, create a project/document, but need a quick way to save it or send it to themselves. Yeah, there’s always Gmail, but I like the ease of use of this site and like the ability to collaborate.
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FaceBook Launches “Pages”
November 13, 2007
A few days ago Facebook launched Facebook Pages, officially allowing groups, businesses, organizations, etc. to host official sites. This is a great addition in a number of ways. Previously users had to form groups if they wanted to support an organization, now there can be an official page and supporters will be displayed as “fans.” The page administrators can also find and add relevant FaceBook applications, further enhancing the page’s usefulness. At our library, we created a group a little over a year ago to help students become more familiar with the library, and it’s always been a little awkward. Now, users can come to our official pages, check the events calendar, follow suggested links, and IM with a librarian directly from the page.
Check us out at: http://richmond.facebook.com/profile.php?id=6009397930 or just search for “boatwright library” (login required). Feedback is always welcome!
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New Position/Role!
November 1, 2007
As of today I am the new Emerging Web Technologies Librarian for Boatwright Memorial Library at the University of Richmond! This is the type of work I’ve been eager to focus on for a longtime now. I’m entering this job after being in the access services world for 11 years, beginning with serving as the Stacks Supervisor at Z. Smith Reynolds Library at Wake Forest University as well as Head of Access Services at Virginia Commonwealth University and here at the University of Richmond. My new priorities focus on serving as the library webmaster as well as exploring service delivery through web 2.0 tools, mobile devices, etc. This means I get to play with and test all of the cool stuff that’s constantly being released on the web! The more beta/open source, the better!
My initial priorities will be preparing to move the library website to the university’s new CMS - Cascade Server from Hannon Hill. I’m also finalizing a wiki that our customer services group will use to organize all of the procedures and policies that desk staff need access to. We’re also going to re-examine our IM service over winter break and see if Meebo might be more suited to our needs.
Anyway, I’m really excited about the new possibilities that exist in this position and I’ve got a long list of people out there to talk with about their experiences with various technologies and platforms, so don’t run if I come calling!
Library 100 Book Finding Tutorial
August 8, 2007
Our library recently produced this video to show during our Library 100 freshmen orientation sessions. It’s pretty funny and shows the talents of two previous Access and Delivery student employees! Nick Vogel in our Media Resource Center filmed and edited the video.
New Levels of Spam
August 3, 2007
At work we have recently been discussing the problem of spam sent through our web forms (formmail.pl). Apparently somewhere people are paid to sit and fill out web forms in order to submit unwanted advertisements. Now let’s take it a step further. Below is something that was submitted as a question via the internal eBay messaging system regarding an item I’m auctioning:
dear friend:
We are www.superll.com. we are distributer,we have many wellknown
products such as dell,ibm,sony,panasonic,philip,samsung,nokia,nikon,olympus,canon,
fujifilm and so on.
there are many sorts of digital products in stock for sale.
they are original and in good condition,also one year international warranty with
the manufacters.
We do business such as drop ship and wholesale.
if you are interested in our product please have a look on our website
and contact us by following means.thanks.
Web address : www.superll.com
Email : superll8@hotmail.com
Msn : superll8@hotmail.com
thanks.
After a quick Google search, it appears that others have received this as well. What’s funnier is that the spammer’s eBay account purchased two (very cheap) items in June in order to gain a small amount of legitimacy. Oh well, they probably wouldn’t be doing it unless the occasional person fell for the scam.
Unfortunately spam appears to account for 80 - 90 percent of all email traffic, depending on the source. Due to this, many are predicting an eventual transfer of messaging to a combination of IM and social networks. However, I’m sure spammers will only come up with a more sophisticated solution. It’s the web’s version of the Cold War.
