Andy Morton

New UR Libraries Beta Website

Andy — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 03:08:01 +0000

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.

Does Technology Make Us Happier?

Andy — Sun, 24 May 2009 02:12:18 +0000

A few months ago comedian Louis C.K. appeared on the Late Show with Conan O’Brien and shared his thoughts on the numerous technological wonders we all take for granted. Watch this clip and decide for yourself, does technology make you happier or leave you frustrated?

Weekly Poll: Do You Ever Turn Your Phone Off?

Andy — Mon, 18 May 2009 13:20:34 +0000

I realized over the weekend the only time I turn my cell phone (iPhone) off is when there’s a problem and it needs to reboot. My last phone was a BlackBerry Curve and I used the auto on/off feature to shut it down over night. Both phones (especially the BlackBerry) require up to 1 minute to fully power up. This can be really inconvenient if I quickly need to get to some data, and yes I’m aware of how impatient this sounds! I am interested in how other people deal with this issue, so here is my question for you (post a comment if you need to elaborate!):

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Moo Minicards For Your Library

Andy — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 19:59:33 +0000

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.

Older Learners

Andy — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 04:59:53 +0000

You can’t teach an old dog new tricks or so they say, but I have a recent personal example that challenges this adage. My father, who is 71 has very quickly mastered a fourth generation iPod photo I loaded with music and passed along to him. He’s also sending me an occasional text message from his recently upgraded cell phone, with brief updates on the weather back home, travel plans, etc. What has surprised me the most is that while he loves the music capabilities of the iPod, he’s drawn to the solitary card game, one of the default games that comes on previous generations of iPods. Personally I’ve never been too interested in gaming on older iPods as there are much better mobile gaming platforms, but in his case he’s very happy, possibly obsessed with winning at solitaire, over and over again. Personally, I’ve enjoyed seeing him learn a new technology and continue to expand his horizons, which is what we should all be doing as often as we can. Here’s to lifelong learning!

Improv Everywhere Strikes Again

Andy — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 04:51:58 +0000

If you haven’t seen any of Improv Everywhere’s “work” then you’re missing out. Their missions (their term, not mine) focus on bringing a bit of randomness and peculiarity to mundane situations. That’s where it gets fun. Often people don’t quite know how to react, but it always seems to bring them out of their comfort zone, which leaves them open to actually connecting with other human beings. That’s exactly what happens in this new video. Here’s the background: this is a very busy subway hub in New York, so you can imagine the attitudes during morning rush-hour. However something happens that completely changes the entire experience and possibly the rest of their day. It’s interesting to watch all of the smiles break out on the commuters’ faces as a completely random, but uniquely human experience happens to them. It breaks their focus on the day’s problems they’re probably already stressing over. Watch the video below or read more about the mission!

Happy Anniversary Mac (Belated)

Andy — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 03:02:48 +0000

A few weeks ago on January 24, Apple celebrated 25 years of Macintosh. This prompted me to think about my own computing experience and how that has changed over the years. Although Apple released the Mac in 1984, the Apple II line continued to thrive for quite sometime and the following Christmas I received my first computer, an Apple IIc with an Apple Imagewriter dot matrix printer! If I remember correctly it came with 128k of ram, and the only boot options were directly from formatted 5.25 inch floppy discs. Looking back, those specifications seem so far beyond inadequate that it’s laughable. Fortunately at the time I couldn’t see 25 years down the road and was VERY content to have a state-of-the-art personal computer!

I was already familiar with the Apple (and other computer) platforms before getting the IIc. I had used Commodore 64 computers, a TRS 80, and an Apple II+ at friends’ houses. My parents also signed me up for a summer computer camp (insert nerd laughter here) using Apple II computers sponsored by our local school system. All this to say that I had a very good idea where to start after setting the computer up. They also purchased some educational software and a couple of games I remember talking them into. I think after a while though I had the most fun just writing small programs in BASIC (10 Home, 20 Print “Hello World”). Of course, then came Zork, a text based adventure game, which you download free of charge nowadays. There was also that early version of The Oregon Trail which I borrowed from the school computer lab (dual floppy disc drives were handy)!

I continued to use the IIc all the way through high school, but in college quickly switched to the Mac. There were several labs on campus equipped with Macs and my first student job was with the school paper as a reporter and photographer and we used Macs exclusively for writing and desktop publishing (wow, there’s a term you never hear anymore). There were also some “IBM compatible” labs on campus running DOS, but by this time I was quite the Apple snob fan. I continued using Macs through undergrad and then into grad school, but by this time Apple was on shaky ground and Windows 95 had been released. It truly looked like the end was nigh for Apple, so when I needed to get a computer for grad school, I decided to go with a Sony Vaio running Windows and was happy with the decision.

For the next 10 years in my professional life I used nothing but Windows (98, 2000, and XP), but in 2008 I had the opportunity to get a new work laptop and switched back to Apple and am currently using a Macbook Pro. However in my personal life, our home computers run XP and I think at this point I’m content being bilingual. What does the future hold? It’s hard to tell at this point. Apple will soon be releasing a new version of their operating system with some very exciting changes that I’ve read about. Microsoft will be releasing Windows 7 later this year which I’m beta testing on one of my XP computers at home and it also looks very promising (it takes some great cues from the Mac OS)! I think as long as Apple and Microsoft continue to force each other to innovate, we’ll all come out ahead.

Image of the Day

Andy — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 15:10:32 +0000

Given the current state or our economy, I thought the following was funny AND appropriate:

Webtools and Possibilties

Andy — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 15:46:38 +0000

I came across yet another “upload your photo and have fun with it” site the other day, but found this one to be quite good at manipulating the image and making it “fit” with the intended placement. The effects are nice and entertaining. Anyway, it’s just another example of how the internet is replacing the desktop as the preferred place for applications, etc. That said, It’ll be a long time before I give up Picassa for photo organizing and management of pictures of our family and kids!

The site is http://photofunia.com. Oh, and you haven’t seen Yearbook Yourself yet, you should probably stop by there first!

I made three photos with Photofunia, and here’s the full set.

My Wordle

Andy — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 21:00:38 +0000

Robert Frost’s poetry has long spoken to me, especially “Stopping by Woods…” Thanks to a heads-up from friends Eric Palmer and Tom Woodward, I’ve used Wordle to create a word cloud with appropriate coloring:

Click the image for full size and visit Wikipedia’s entry on this poem to learn more about it…