So, once you do that, you might wonder: what’s with this “library quick search” thing?

The library quick search allows you to easily look for various types of materials by selecting the different tabs above the search box.

Specifically, you can think of the different tabs this way:

Summon is the “one-stop shopping” tab.  It searches 90+% of all library resources, including the items we physically own, online journal articles, and digital collections.  Totally lost and about to start weeping?  Start here!

Midcat+ provides a way to search the materials physically held by the library, as well as selected online resources such as eBooks.  This tab also lets you search NExpress, the combined catalog and holdings of 7 New England college libraries, and which you can use to borrow things Middlebury doesn’t own.  If you are looking for a specific book, movie, or CD that you think Middlebury or one of our partner libraries might own, try using this search.

Journals A-Z and Databases A-Z provide a way to look up specific journal or database titles, and see exactly which issues we provide access to.  You can also use a keyword to find all journals or databases containing a specific word in the title or description, e.g. “jazz” or “biology.”

Reserves is a easy way to view course reserves by class or professor name.

Videos searches our DVD and VHS holdings.  Check out the “browse videos by genre” function if you’re looking for, say, film noir or romantic comedies.

And, if you get stuck, there’s always a librarian around to help you figure things out.  Welcome to Middlebury!

If you agree to help, we’ll observe and record you performing some tasks on the website.

Sessions will be scheduled from Monday, February 27 through Thursday, March 8 in the Davis Family Library. If you’re interested, please sign up by Thursday February 23rd (sign-ups are now closed), and we’ll respond with a confirmation. Details are below.

The session will take no longer than 45 minutes (15 minutes for explanation and summary, and 30 minutes for testing activities). We’ll ask you to perform specific tasks and we’ll use your responses in our work to improve the site. Your participation will be strictly used within LIS staff and not shared with any outside organization.

Thank you for taking this opportunity to help LIS improve its web presence!

The UNA results were based on a handful of participants in focus groups and a relatively small number of responses to webpage pop-up surveys (particularly for certain web pages). We are now turning our focus to designing Usability testing (likely based on the format used by the original Website Team). We hope to achieve better participation for this phase of our assessment. We’ll wait to share the results of our UNA until Usability testing is complete and summarized, effectively sharing all the new LIS Website assessment data at once.

Tags

Tag Clouds

This does not mean that you shouldn’t tag content at all. Tags can still be useful for humans who want to find other posts and pages on a topic. However, if you want your page to be easier to find, your time is better invested in making sure that the content is well written, structured and relevant to a particular topic.

Erastus Hibbard Phelps Collection

The winning bid on the Archive of Civil War paymaster Erastus Hibbard Phelps, Middlebury Class of 1861, was made at auction by Andy Wentink, Curator of Special Collections & Archives. The archive was one among nearly 350 lots of American History, including Civil War, materials offered by Cowan’s Auctions in Cincinnati, OH, last Friday morning, December 2. The Phelps Archive comprises 334 letters, 4 diaries (3 from Civil War years), 2 bound volumes including a photo album containing portraits of graduates of the Middlebury Class of 1861, many of which are inscribed to Phelps. The archive also includes two photos of Phelps previous to his years at Middlebury, his paymaster sidearm (a Colt 1851 Navy 36 caliber pistol), what is believed to be his sheepskin winter jacket worn on duty, and a leather documents trunk carried during his service.

Andy also made the winning bid on another Civil War archive, 54 Letters of 2nd Lieut. Ephraim L. Hackett, Wisconsin 1st Light Artillery. Born in Maine in 1837, Ephraim L. Hackett was living in Baraboo, Wisconsin, in August 1861, when he enlisted as a Sergeant in the 1st Independent Battery, Wisconsin Light Artillery. Small in number and mobile, the Battery recruited barely over 100 men before being sent into the field in Kentucky that Fall, then went on to fight up and down the Mississippi Valley until the end of the war.

These two important Civil War collections significantly enhance Middlebury’s already impressive Civil War era archival holdings including the Aldace Walker (Middlebury Class of 1862) Letters, the Calvin Parker Letters, the Civil War Archive of Professor Kit Wilson, and nearly 100 Civil War era letters from individual writers.

The purchase of the Phelps and Hackett archives was made possible through the generous partial funding from the Friends of the Davis Family Library, the Middlebury College Museum of Art, the Julian W. Abernethy Fund, and the Davis Family Library.

• Searching: the Midd Google search & special Helpdesk Google search
• Training: Lynda
• Drupal: documentation and new editing interface
• Self-service PIN and password updating
• Media services Event Recording & Film Screening forms
• Middmedia

The tools we used were chosen with the target audience in mind:

• an LIS eNewsletter to reach faculty, staff, & students who actually read e-mail
• advertisements in “The Campus” to reach students as well as faculty & staff
• posters to reach students
• creation of more “go” links for easy access
• use of QR codes to attract the attention of mobile device enthusiasts

We’ve also been trying to assess the effectiveness of our marketing efforts – here’s a summary of our metrics:

eNewsletter – special edition. Sent 10/5/11.
Caused a small peak in blog hits – normal background approx 30 per day, peak 196. Some of the eNews links weren’t to blog posts & as you can see below, there were spikes in the stats for featured wiki & web page URLs too.
Top posts on 10/5 – all featured in enews:
Home page 71
All About MiddMedia 16
Lynda in the Limelight 12
What is GO? 12
Searching is new and improved! 11

Unique pageviews /wiki/LIS/Main_Page (Sent Oct 5th, blue)

Unique pageviews /offices/technology/help/ (Sent Oct 5th, blue)

Unique pageviews /offices/technology/help/mediaserv/Recordingrequest (Sent Oct 5th, blue)

QR codes

Perhaps it was the content, or perhaps people in general aren’t following QR codes around here, but the codes we included in our posters & “Campus” advertisements weren’t used much! 3 hits on MiddMedia posters and 1 hit on a “Search” poster.

Changes in use of advertised features

• Self-service PIN and password updating.
  Frequency of Helpdesk HEAT tickets for PIN reset. The decrease in HEAT tickets after the marketing effort indicates a possible, though transitory, effect!

• Training: Lynda.com
  With the help of Pij Slater, we were able to gather statistics about lynda.com use, but it was difficult to assess for sure whether our advertising caused any spikes in new-user accounts (posters around campus, bookmarks, LISblog posts, and an ad in The Campus on Nov. 3.) However, we can chart the number of new users from the time the service was officially rolled out in July,and we see that at least word is getting out:
• July: 30
• August: 103
• September: 107
• October: 80
• Nov. (as of the15th): 46

Overall, it seems as though the strongest tool in our marketing kit is still the LIS eNewsletter, in addition to the MiddPoints News & Announcements blog (also shared as an email digest).

The pages we’re checking are go/lis  go/lib  go/helpdesk and go/ct

Thank you for your help. The results of this and other user needs analysis activities (UNA) will be shared with LIS in a future posting.

The LIS Website Team.

• Toolbar & right-click context menu: Search your library catalog directly from the LibX toolbar or using the right-click context menu.
• Support for off-campus access via EZProxy/WAM: Using the Library’s off-campus proxy, you may reload a page through the proxy, or follow a link via the proxy, making it appear as though you are coming from an on-campus computer.
• Quick full text access to journal articles: LibX uses Google Scholar to search for articles and directs the user to the electronic copy subscribed to by your Library. Select a citation, then drag-and-drop it onto the Scholar button on the toolbar. You can use this feature even from inside a PDF file, which makes retrieving papers referenced in a PDF file a snap.
• Support for embedded cues: LibX places cues in web pages you visit if your library has resources related to that page. Whenever you see the cue, click on the link to look at what the Library has to offer. For instance, book pages at Amazon or Barnes & Noble will contain cues that link to the book’s entry in Midcat. Cues are displayed at Google, Yahoo! Search, the NY Times Book Review, and other pages.

Campus Map

• Since last week’s post, we’ve added:
  • custom marker icons
  • course listings for locations
  • custom location categories like “parking lots”
  • autozoom and autocenter the map on available markers
• You can read more about the Campus Map project in this earlier post on the LIS blog.

Course Hub

• The Add Resource button now works in IE 7.

Drupal

• We’re testing out a new spam prevention module on the Ask a Librarian form that block spam bots without annoying actual humans. It does this by adding some hidden fields to the form that trip up automated spammers. If you’d like to have this added to your form, just let us know.

Library Systems

• Work continues on Summon.  Latest links into the Drupal platform include the search widget on the LIS main page (go/lis) where there was previously only a text link, and a proliferation of simple sidebar widgets on the Library pages.
• SubjectsPlus interface alterations to reflects the change from WebBridge to 360 as our OpenURL link resolver in the Summon implementation.

Search

When we launched the new version of our website, we put in place a search strategy that would automatically forward you to a page if we were reasonably sure that the page was where you wanted to end up. For example, if you searched for “academic calendar”, you’d end up on the page with the current year’s academic calendar instead of a search results page. The way we made this work is to automatically forward you to the GO shortcut if your search matched an existing GO shortcut. So, if go/dining exists and you search for “dining” you go to the site that go/dining points at.

At the time we set this up, the GO database contained around 1,000 entries, mostly redirects to academic departments, offices, programs, or local government or non-profit organizations. GO was a self-service application at that time, but wasn’t often used by students, faculty and staff to create shortcuts.

There are now 4321 GO shortcuts in the database, including aliases. People use it to get the word out about their events (go/justice, go/bachfest), faculty create shortcuts to their course sites (go/chns0475), staff create quick links to advertise new services (go/getoffice), and many other great uses that make us glad this is a self-service application.

At the same time, there are now many GO shortcuts that are links to YouTube videos, other colleges, personal websites, and some that are just jokes. These are, generally, fine to have in the GO database. Even the first version of GO (at the time called the External Redirection Application) in 2005 had a few “easter eggs” that are still there. But because of how our search application interacted with GO, people’s ability to quickly and easily find information on our site was getting hampered by these “un-official” shortcuts.

We’ve now changed the search programming on our site so that it will only forward you automatically for a small subset of search terms. You’ll still go right to WebMail when you search for “webmail”, and similarly for “bannerweb” or “cso”, or “ccal”. But if you search for “chicago” you’ll now see search results instead of the Chicago Manual of Style. We used these criteria to select which search terms would continue to automatically forward you:

1. It is something someone might search for (i.e. bannerweb, but not bannerweb?ugapp).
2. It goes to a page on our site (i.e. capp, but not campusstorage).
3. There’s really only one page that the person means by that search (i.e. chaplain, but not chicago).

New GO shortcuts will initially be excluded from being used in search, but we’ll continue to review the list and change it as needed. We’ll also review statistics from searches on our site to see if new shortcuts need to be created or if we need to make an existing shortcut searchable again.

A few additional notes:

• We haven’t deleted any GO shortcuts today. go/bacon, go/engage, and go/oooooal still exist, but if you search for “bacon” you’ll now see more information about Sir Francis than images of meat.
• You can send a note to go@middlebury.edu if you feel that a code that currently isn’t being used as a search result redirect ought to be. You can also flag GO shortcuts as inappropriate.
• We’ve added a filter for “GO” to the search results page just below “www.middlebury.edu” on the right. Click on that box to filter your search results to only show pages from go.middlebury.edu.

And lastly, a reminder that when you (as a person with a Middlebury account) create shortcuts in GO, or comment on blogs on this site, or edit our wiki, you are bound by the College Handbook policies on Responsible Use of Computing Network Service and Facilities, Anti-Harassment Policy, and any other applicable policies from our Handbook. Though we’ve deleted a couple GO shortcuts in the past for being inappropriate, none have yet been referred to HR, Commons Administration or the Dean of Faculty, but logs are kept on the service and that option is always available.

WordPress

• The embedded Flash audio player that you see in IE 7, IE 8, Firefox and Opera now renders correctly and allows you to play the audio file.
• Many CSS fixes were made to the Translucence theme.