LIS Web Site

Thanks for your attention and questions today in the LIS staff meeting.

As promised, here’s a link to the new LIS page, which links to all other LIS content.  We’re almost done!  Of course, all pages may be tweaked, updated, revamped or revised after usability testing.  In other words, our site still will be a work-in-progress even after the launch…

Please post any comments or questions here in the blog.

28 thoughts on “LIS Web Site

  1. Arabella Holzapfel

    I’m curious why was “All Campus Lectures and Readings” chosen to be the first item under the opening paragraph on the LIS landing page? I can see how it’s a valuable thing to have somewhere on the MC website, but I don’t understand the close connection with LIS.

    Reply
  2. Ian McBride

    It is intended to be a feed of events happening in the Library or sponsored by LIS, coming from our new events calendar. I’m meeting with Lisa Ayers in Events Scheduling both tomorrow and Friday to work on getting the new events calendar set up. Once in place, we hope to be able to get a feed of those events related to LIS and replace the “All Campus Lectures and Readings” placeholder.

    Reply
  3. Mike Roy

    I think the image of the panther reading room needs to be resized; it loads very slowly, and when you view it alone, it is clearly larger than it needs to be.

    – -mike

    Reply
  4. John Connors

    I think that a link to the college map from the Directory/Location field for a selected person would be helpful to someone who needs to locate/meet with that person, but is unfamiliar with where on campus that person/department/building is located.

    Reply
  5. Carrie Macfarlane Post author

    The template on the front page of the library site will be replaced with a search portal like the one on the Amherst page ( https://www.amherst.edu/library/). Our search tabs will be: “Catalog” (searches MIDCAT), “Articles” (searches Academic OneFile), “Journals” (searches go/journals), “Reserves” (searches MIDCAT reserves), and “Videos” (searches MIDCAT videos). We’re not sure if the search portal will be finished in time for the launch. If it is not then we’ll at least have a MIDCAT search like the one at go/lib.

    Reply
  6. Arabella Holzapfel

    I’ve been empowered to respond on behalf of the Digital Archives Team, particularly in regard to some resources Carrie emailed our team about. It seemed appropriate to place the response here.

    The Digital Archives Team feels it would be useful to have a page or section of the LIS/Library website that would include links and descriptions of some useful resources, including:

    BBC sound effects (http://soundfx.middlebury.edu/index.php) [Since access to this one is made by agreement with the BBC and is restricted to community members, it and others like it currently on the CMS site at http://www.middlebury.edu/academics/lis/lib/specialty_resources/ could be separated from the following in some way.]

    Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org/index.php)
    World Digital Library (http://www.wdl.org/en)
    Google Books (http://books.google.com)
    The digital collections of the Library of Congress (http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/dli2/html/list.html)
    Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page)
    —–

    Also, we wondered whether the “Made by Midd” designation has been dropped deliberately or just forgotten about. We feel it was a useful designation and would like it resurrected in some way, perhaps as a tag or category, if possible.

    Thanks for all your hard work on the website, Web Team – it’s an amazing resource!

    Reply
    1. Carrie Macfarlane Post author

      Hi Arabella,

      Thanks to you and the Dig Coll Team for your responses. I think I need a little clarification on a few points, so I’ll give you a call. I can respond to your “Made by Midd” question right away though.

      We still want to find a place for “Made by Midd” (feature for College Archives) on the front page, but we haven’t figured out where to put it. It was going to be in the juicebar, but we’ve abandoned the juicebar for various reasons (it took up a lot of space, it can’t display RSS feeds, it does basically the same thing as the carousel, etc.). Finding a place for “Made by Midd” is on our post-launch list of things to do.

      Reply
      1. Arabella Holzapfel

        Thanks, Carrie. Also I should have pointed out that the page/section for web resources described in the first part of my response is considered a post-launch (or “someday”) item. I hope that’s obvious by the timing of the response. ;-)

        Reply
    1. Mike

      Thanks Adam! Fast work and looks good. There are a couple things that need to be changed: the catalog search needs to include “&searchscope=1” so that searches are of the Middlebury libraries only and don’t include Ilsley; the Videos search did not work for me — it at least needs to include “&searchscope=3” but there may be something else wrong as well. I’ll look at the Gale OneSearch articles widget — I’d like it to default to Academic Journals rather than Magazines, but that may not have anything to do with the widget.

      Reply
      1. Adam Franco

        Thanks for the feedback, Mike. I have updated the forms to include the SORT parameter and a few other things from the MIDCAT forms, so the now should work. I must have picked up a cookie in my testing yesterday that allowed my searches to work while clean browsers weren’t.

        – Adam

        Reply
    2. Mike

      We may also need to play with ezproxy settings. I think I had embedded some code in my widget, but now I see on the Gale widget page you can tell them about your proxy: “Enter your Location ID and Proxy URL below and your proxy settings will be activated for all current and future widgets.” I did that, but I don’t know how long it takes for it to take effect.

      Reply
  7. Kellam Ayres

    The search portal looks great — this is so exciting! Well done everyone. I have a few questions about the Reserves tab. First, can the search options include faculty last name? And can this take the place of the “course name” search option, which, I’m only discovering now, doesn’t actually work. We input the course name into Mill when placing items on Reserve, and the title shows up in MIDCAT, but it doesn’t seem like it’s searchable. Also, I wonder if there is room for a link to EReserves on the Reserves tab? Thanks again, all.

    Reply
        1. Kellam Ayres

          Thanks Bryan for adding the ERes link. Could the link be moved down so it doesn’t come between the text and the search box? Also, the initial text — “Type the course name or number you want to find, then press the Enter key or click Submit” — is taken from the MIDCAT page (where the “button” is different). So between that, and the fact that Reserves aren’t searchable by course name, perhaps the text should read as follows:

          Type the course number (e.g. AMST0245) then press the Enter key or click the button

          [search box and button]

          Search by Instructor Name

          Find electronic reserve readings – ERes

          For Faculty

          Reply
          1. Carrie Macfarlane Post author

            Thanks for noticing all of this, Kellam! We’ll make these changes to the text.

            Regarding the search by course name — this search doesn’t seem to be working in regular MIDCAT either. We’ll look into this (perhaps Bryan is already looking into it0, and we’ll probably need your help!

            In an earlier post, you requested that we include the option to search by faculty name. We plan to add that search window sometime after launch.

  8. Richard Jenkins

    Very minor point —

    From the Library site (which is looking great!), the Quick Links tab to LIS has a gray (I think) font instead of white. It may make the LIS tab easier to overlook. Can you change the font color?

    For more comparison: From the LIS site, ‘Library’ quick links tab has white font and stands out better.

    Reply
    1. Ian McBride

      Thanks for this suggestion. I’ve made a couple quick changes to the templates this morning that fix the color of the Quick Links titles and the green link text in the left column of the site. We’re planning to finish up any possible functionality for the site by the end of this week and spend all of next week working on site tweaks like this to make sure we’re ready for launch.

      Reply
  9. Jeff Rehbach

    I know the work on the technology site is still in progress, and trying not to be too picky, but wondering if we can clarify that the “helpdesk has a strong presence on the wiki” link might be reworded a bit to suggest that it takes you to documentation and information about software, hardware, media, etc? Another thought was, if this is possible, to hyperlink the header for “LIS Wiki-Public documentation” to the wiki (or provide a link at that point on the page to the main page for the documentation) and explain the feed that the user sees is recently updated postings to the wiki. Thanks for considering!

    Reply
  10. Brenda

    Thanks Adam for getting the library portal working and thanks Ian for all the work you’ve done. When the time comes for improvements, I offer a few suggestions:
    I think with the midcat search in the portal, people will use it almost exclusively yet miss some extras offered on the main menu. The advanced search option for more is a big help but it doesn’t highlight some of the links on the main midcat menu. Since it looks like there’s room, at some point could we say For more options, use Advanced Search or Main Menu.

    Also I’m glad you’ve responded to Kellam’s request for a link to E-Res. Could there be some additonal wording to clarify that the searches below that are for print or media reserves? In the past I’ve found some people confused by the separate ways one has to search.

    Also, is it possible to move the Subject Guides widget above the fold? Perhaps you could replace the rotating photo on the left with the widget (or reduce the Ask a Librarian widget to link to the email form instead of providing it on screen). You could move the photo to the carosel??

    And I’m sure this will never happen, but I’ll mention it anyways. I know its the college style to use that big font for lead paragraphs, but I think the message would actually look nicer if it were a smaller font and not the initial light green. It would also eat up less space so you might see what’s below without scrolling.

    Otherwise the site is a great improvement and sure looks better!

    Reply
    1. Carrie Macfarlane Post author

      Thanks, Brenda, here are a few responses:

      -Good idea about adding a “Main Menu” link to the “Catalog” tab, and adding some clarification to the “Reserves” tab.
      -We’ll experiment with something different for the Subject Guides node in the sidebar. Bryan is going to try to make it smaller by changing it to a drop-down menu like the one at http://midd2.middlebury.edu/academics/lib/research/db-subject. I’ve just moved it higher (above “Ask a Librarian”) in anticipation. I think the photo gallery on the left is important because it adds some color and interest and makes the text in the center of the page maybe a little more inviting.
      -We’ve considered not using a form in the “Ask a Librarian” node but really want to try it in case it increases the likelihood that people will write. Feedback from others is welcome.
      -I think it’s good to be consistent with other college pages. Users (hopefully) will come to understand that larger, colored text explains what the site is all about. The larger text also makes the whole page a little more interesting, I think. I understand what you’re saying about scrolling though. Other feedback is welcome on this.

      Thanks for all of your ideas!

      Reply

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