Tuesday, May 31-Thursday, June 2      By Appointment Only

Friday, June 3                                           Open 1-5 p.m.  for Reunion Weekend

Saturday, June 4                                      Open 10 a.m.-2 p.m. for Reunion Weekend

June 5-19                                                  CLOSED

Monday, June 20-Friday, August19     By Appointment Only

Monday, August 22-Friday, September 2    CLOSED

CLOSED WEEKENDS DURING THE SUMMER

Tuesday, May 24

Tuesday, May 24, 4pm (Pacific Daylight Time)
Duration: 45 minutes (includes Q&A) – Registration link

Tuesday, May 24, 6pm (Pacific Daylight Time)
Duration: 45 minutes (includes Q&A) – Registration link

Wednesday, May 25

Wednesday, May 25, 6am (Pacific Daylight Time)
Duration: 45 minutes (includes Q&A) – Registration link

Wednesday, May 25, 8am (Pacific Daylight Time)
Duration: 45 minutes (includes Q&A) – Registration link

When additional info comes in, I will post it.

There were brief presentations each day by Innovative and SkyRiver staff highlighting tips and support info. They also had a poster area which showcased new ideas.
The Innovative Interfaces Info Center was available during the entire 3 days, and the staff told me the new product, “Sierra” is coming very soon (no date).  What I was told about Sierra is that it is a service-oriented architecture, acts as an integrated resource management and work flow with one piece of software (no modules), and users have a choice of a cloud or local-based deployment. Millennium will continue to be supported of course, with a new release underway.
If you would like to contact the Innovative Interfaces service rep Deborah Devine, she welcomes communication:
Internet: http://www.iii.com
Email: ddevine@iii.com

Follow Innovative on Twitter http://twitter.com/iii_Innovative

• improved Google search has recently been implemented on the whole Middlebury site, which has already made searching for LIS content much easier

• a revised structure for the LIS Help & Support web pages

• improved directory search results, so search “by department” displays the job titles for all members of the department. For example, the listing for all LIS staff

• site banners that currently say “Library and Information Services” will soon display additional text for clearer branding of the different LIS website sections

• quick links navigation items are now standardized across all parts of the LIS web presence

• better color use in the “leaf” color theme for improved legibility

• templates for the LIS blog that align with the Drupal site, with new design options for the LIS wiki in progress

• on-page search boxes for pages that include sub-page lists is now labeled “Find on this page:” to distinguish from site-wide search boxes

• added links to check ILL requests in My MIDCAT

• a simpler format for pages that link to multiple forms for clearer and easier navigation. For example: Collection Management Forms

Remember, there’s also an option for anyone to report issues with a page using the Problems with this Page? button, and you can get in touch with LIS Content Managers by finding them at go/liscm.

What’s next? We’re moving on from following-up on the old recommendations to working on marketing strategies for the site, and soon afterward, another round of testing, likely in the form of a user needs analysis and more usability testing. Feel free to send us feedback any time. Thanks!

For the past few weeks the Reference & Instruction workgroup has taken the lead on posting content to this Page. Today we write to invite Fans and feedback from all of LIS (and beyond), and explain how you may help us make this page a vibrant and vital part of our online presence.

Who is this for/What is going to appear on the Page?:

We hope to focus the Page primarily toward students, but we also think the content and information shared there will be of interest to Staff and Faculty. We received feedback from SLAC (Student LIS Advisory Committee) that content postings to the Page should not be too frequent.

How will things be added?/I’d like to share something!:

If you have content you’d like to have featured on the LIS Facebook Page,  get in touch with the social media community managers, Jess Isler and Joy Pile.

Please let us know if you have questions or feedback to share about the Page. Thanks! Oh, and “Liking” the Page counts as feedback, too!

Read on for notes on the sessions we attended.

Keynote Presentation: Dries Buytaert (video)

Dries is the original developer of Drupal and gives the “state of Drupal” kickoff speech each year. This presentation is already available as streaming video (see the link above). The rest of the session videos will be up after the conference and when they’re ready we’ll make a blog post linking you to a few that are interesting for site editors – especially a session on the webform module.

The big news in the keynote this year is that development on Drupal 8 is going to begin at this conference and the developers who work on the core Drupal software are going to try to move to a more regular release schedule for new versions. We are currently running Drupal 6 and will be working on moving to Drupal 7 this year. Other news is that Drupal 8 is going to add more support for mobile and HTML5. There is a very good overview of HTML5 online if you’re unsure what this term means.

Media module for Drupal 7

Not to be confused with the Media module we run, which is part of Monster Menus, the code we work with Amherst to develop for Drupal, the Media module for Drupal 7 does many of the same things, but is a lot more slick about it. In Drupal 6, the standard way to add files to a site is to make them their own nodes (this is essentially what we do with File Upload nodes) or attach them to existing nodes as fields. The first way makes it easy to reuse files, but hard to use them inside content and the second way makes it easy to use files inside other content, but hard to reuse them.

The Drupal 7 media module is an attempt to resolve these conflicts. It’s still very early on in its development and use, but has features like the ability to manage YouTube videos like other files, drag-and-drop uploads and drag-and-drop reordering for photo galleries. Their goal is for Media to become the standard file-management system for Drupal 8. As work on this continues, we’ll see how we can use this modules features on our site, either by adding them to our Media module or making this module work with Monster Menus.

Drupal Security for Coders

This session was a good overview of the content in Cracking Drupal, given by the author. It focused on preventing XSS and CSRF attacks.

Rockin’ HTML5 with Drupal

I’m wary of any presentation that includes a slide with the title “Web 3.0″, but fortunately here it was used as a bit of a joke. There was a high-level discussion of the new features available to you when you convert your site markup to use HTML5, and this conversion is one of our goals this year at Middlebury. She also discussed the HTML5 Tools module, which is used to re-write a lot of HTML that Drupal produces so that it is HTML5 markup instead.

This is useful for all the forms Drupal creates, not just the webforms you add to your site, but the page settings form, and the node editing form, and the copy/move form, etc. HTML5 adds a lot of new form markup so that you can have a non-JavaScript date picker, type suggestions in the field, and my favorite example is that you can mark a field as “email” and mobile device keyboards will include an @ symbol, or mark the field as “number” and the mobile keyboard will automatically which to a number pad when you move into the field.

Aphorisms of API design

A good session on designing APIs in Drupal systems. Talked a lot about how to make modules pluggable and when to do so. The topics discussed will be useful as we refactor our modules for Drupal 7.

Views for Hackers

The talk was an overview of the Views module and how its concepts like “relationships”, “arguments”, and “filters” translate to code and database queries. Most of the information was already familiar to us, but it made some of these concepts easier to understand.

Discussions with Amherst Developers

Our colleagues from Amherst are also here and we got to chat with Victor, Anita, and James. They’ve already helped us patch two issues that were bugging me and helped explain what the new Monster Menus CCK module is. I’m burying this at the bottom of this blog post because this is a really neat feature and I’m not sure when it will be available, but we’ll try to add it very soon.

MM CCK adds a new “node picker” and “page picker” field type to nodes. If you’ve ever created a News posting or Story on our website and needed to add an image to it, you know that you do this by starting to type the name of the image in a field which searches the entire site for all images and you pick yours from that list. With the new “node picker”, you’ll get a popup window just like you do when you put an image inline in content and you’ll be able to browse just your site’s File Uploads folder.

We’ve had a good exchange so far and look forward to continuing our discussion as the conference goes on.

Overview

What follows is a report on the state of notable web applications and sites in use at Middlebury including the College website, the Middlebury instance of WordPress (i.e. sites.middlebury.edu) and a variety of key web applications that provide services widely used by faculty, students and staff.

Box Office

• Addition of separate billing and shipping addresses when ordering tickets or gift items from the box office, especially useful for parents purchasing items for students.
• Improved the user interface to make purchasing as a returning customer and identifying seat locations in the seating chart simpler.

CAS – Single Sign On

The Central Authentication System (CAS) was introduced last year and allows you to move between many of our web applications after you’ve signed in once. GO and the main college website were already using CAS this time last year but since then it’s been added to many other applications, including:

• Course Catalog
• MediaWiki
• MiddMedia
• WordPress

Course Catalog

Over the past two years we developed the Course Catalog application at catalog.middlebury.edu to serve as a clearing house for accessing course information on the web due to the limitations on searching for this information via BannerWeb. The Course Catalog application allows users to search for courses based on a wide variety of criteria (including keyword searching) and properly displays and links-together cross-listed courses. The Course Catalog application also feeds course information to the department pages and faculty profiles in the main Drupal site.

New for this year, the Course Catalog has been extended to add a Schedule Planning tool that allows students to bookmark courses they are interested in, then group them together into weekly schedules to ensure that they do not have timing conflicts and that lab and discussion sections are chosen. These schedules can be printed or emailed to one’s advisor.

• Added the Schedule Planning tool.
• Users can now bookmark courses that they find interesting.
• Updated the theme to match the new website. Added a custom theme for the MIIS catalog.
• The printed Catalog is now created via an export from the Course Catalog application rather than being copy-pasted from the site by hand.
• PDF snapshots of the Catalog are now automatically generated as course descriptions and requirements get edited over the year.
• Lots of small improvements to the display of course data in search results and while browsing.
• Can now search for courses by campus — needed for Language Schools that have more than one site.
• Greatly improved the speed of the application.
• Improved the feed of courses to faculty profiles to ensure that cross-listed courses are ordered properly.
• New admin forms that allow the Registrar to suppress incomplete information about upcoming terms during data-entry.

Drupal

• Alerts: Though it hasn’t been needed yet, there is now a special alert bar that will appear on the site in the case of a campus emergency.
• Athletics Database: Many improvements, including results automatically posted to Twitter and a site that tracks the live feeds for each event.
• Calendars: Added a content type to allow offices to embed promotional calendars of their events on their department page. Updated event calendar interface to make it easier to use and added Featured Events. Clicking on items in the calendar view open in the same window (preserves page continuity). Daily breakout of events is much more pleasing to look at.
• Editing: Upgraded the WYSIWYG editor to resolve issues in Safari and Internet Explorer as well as allow pasting from MS Word without needing to use the button.
• External Links: Links to external sites will now open in a new browser window or tab automatically, though editors can choose to override this for specific links.
• Locations: You can add geo-locational information to any piece of content on the site by expanding the Locations section when editing.
• Meta Tags: A description of the content is now automatically added to each node, improving search results. Editors can customize the description and keywords.
• MiddLab: Added a content type to allow offices to embed a sidebar feature to display MiddLab projects happening in their area.
• Previews: Added a “Preview Live Site” checkbox to the Edit Console and a “Preview” button to the editing form.
• Printing: A special stylesheet allows you to print just the content of the page including contact information in the Address area.
• Search: Converted the main site search engine to use a Google Custom Search Engine to improve results, increasing our index from 175,000 pages to over 360,000 pages. You can also ask us to create a custom search engine for your part of the site. This complements the large review of Search functionality we conducted immediately after the site launch.
• Sharing: Added sharing buttons to news articles to let you send emails to friends, or post the stories to Facebook and Twitter.
• Webform: Many new features including multi-page forms, validating responses, and email templates.
• Video: Videos from MiddMedia and YouTube now use the HTML5 player in supported browsers and devices allowing you to watch them on iPhones and iPads. You can now add YouTube playlists. We also now support the use of autoplay, autorewind, loop and image attributes in videos.
• LIS Pages: Problems with this Page? link on LIS pages allows you to report an issue with the content on a page such as a spelling error, incorrect information, a broken link, etc. The submissions are reviewed by our newly assigned content managers.

GO

The GO shortcut/permalink application has become quite central to the web infrastructure of the college since its launch several years ago. It eased the launch of the new site by allowing links in content to be easily updated en-mass. In the past year GO has become central to our search strategy as GO shortcuts are now provided as suggestions and automatic-redirects when you enter search terms on the main site.

• Totally new editing interface.
• Verbose, color coded, messages to indicate successful or unsuccessful completion of actions.
• Additional input validation to preserve shortcut integrity and prevent abuse.
• Ability for community to flag GO links as inappropriate.
• New “Info” pages for every shortcut allow everyone to see detailed information about the shortcut such as who maintains it, what its aliases are, and where it goes.
• All GO shortcuts are now shown publicly in the GOtionary (with the exception of a few internal shortcuts) to improve the transparency of the system.
• Enhanced admin interface for flag admins and the new super admin role.
• Can now switch between the Middlebury and  MIIS GOtionaries.

MiddMedia

• New “Midd” theme integrates more closely with the current Middlebury theme.
• Add to MiddTube button allows users to check off the videos they would like to batch add to MiddTube as video posts.
• We’ve upgraded to Flash Media Server 4, with a lot of new features that we’ll be rolling out and supporting in the coming months.

New Sites

We’ve been able to expand the Drupal and WordPress platforms to add a CMS experience for sites that were previously static HTML files and create new sites to show off and assist student research and projects.

• Davis United World College Scholars Program
• Projects for Peace
• MiddLab
• MiddSTART
• Middlebury College Museum of Art

SubjectsPlus

In December, we upgraded from version 0.7 to 0.9.  Changes include:

• Enhanced security.
• In addtion to Research by Subject, two new guide types are available: Research by Course and Research by Topic.
• Widget-based, drag-and-drop control panel for content creators.
• Multiple subject specialists (guide owners) now possible.
• Description field override.  This allows for a resource description to be customized for one or more guides, while still allowing the resource record to be shared among all the guides.  This cuts down on duplication of records and/or breaking others shared work.
• Cloning feature

What do we use this for, you ask?

• Databases A-Z list
• Research guides (access via sidebar at go/lib and go/subjectguides among other places.)
• globally adding EZproxy prefix for off-campus access.