Author Archives: Bryan Carson

About Bryan Carson

Web Services & Systems Librarian

More Consistent Linking from Library Databases

In order to provide a consistently satisfactory user experience, in which users of the Library’s research databases (and the Summon discovery service) don’t face dead-end blank screens when trying to reach articles and books, the Library will deactivate Index-enhanced Direct Linking (IEDL) in our link resolver (360Link).

What does this mean exactly?
Index-enhanced Direct Linking (IEDL) is available for certain article databases that cooperate with the company which provides 360Link.  IEDL takes the user from a results list to an article or book without any kind of intermediate screen. From certain databases (and from Summon), IEDL was supposed to streamline the user experience by eliminating clicks between the search results and the items themselves. This has not turned out to be the case.

What will I see?
When you click on a link for full-text, you will now see the familiar intermediate screen for all articles and books.  This “Get it @ Midd” screen is 360Link, our link resolver.  You will then click a button to access the item, as you always have in cases where you saw this screen. The intermediate screen will be similar to the following example:

Get It @ Midd page

Why did we make the change?
For several reasons having to do with commercial relationships among various database vendors, IEDL used to function better than it currently does. Now, the inconvenience of the dead-end screens occurs much more often. The dead ends (blank screens) provide little or no useful information as to how the user can access materials the Library actually has. Always displaying the intermediate “Get it @ Midd” screen will allow users to see our accurate holdings and to obtain access consistently.

Questions and/or Feedback
Please feel free to comment below or send questions to the Midd librarians at http://go.middlebury.edu/askus .

ILLiad Web pages down for ILLiad Upgrade

The upgrade is now complete.

The ILLiad web pages will be down from 9:00 am today while we upgrade the ILLiad software to v8.7.  The ILL web site will be inaccessible for only a short time, assuming all goes well with the update.

If anyone has problems after 2:00 pm, please contact Rachel Manning at x5498 or rmanning@middlebury.edu for assistance.

Friday Links – December 5, 2014

Gates Foundation announces “world’s strongest policy on Open Access“. ‘from January 2015, researchers it funds must make open their resulting papers and underlying data-sets immediately upon publication — and must make that research available for commercial re-use. “We believe that published research resulting from our funding should be promptly and broadly disseminated,” the foundation states.’

Librarians as publishers. As an example – one of our own: Portulano (while the library may not be “a publisher” of this journal, certain library staff members provided instrumental support in making it accessible)

All About Those Books. The Mount Desert Island High School version of Meghan Trainor’s “All About The Bass.” (MDIHS has just 571 students!)

FSU Shooting Highlights the Need for Library Security.  Library Journal article – “Early in the morning of November 20 a lone gunman opened fire in Florida State University’s (FSU) Strozier Library.”  The library staff will be receiving training this month for how to handle such situations.

Friday Links – June 13, 2014

HathiTrust Digital Library Wins Latest Round in Battle With Authors – Chronicle of Higher Education

Something one just needs to read.  Nice images, too!

The first half is this incredibly dark rant about how the Internet is alienating and inhuman, how it’s turning us all into lonely monsters.”

“But in the second half, I’ll turn it around and present my vision of an alternative future. I’ll get the audience fired up like a proper American motivational speaker. After the big finish, we’ll burst out of the conference hall into the streets of Düsseldorf, hoist the black flag, and change the world.”

As I was preparing this talk, however, I found it getting longer and longer. In the interests of time, I’m afraid I’m only going to be able to present the first half…

 

Summon 2.0 is now Live at Middlebury Libraries

Summon, our library resource discovery layer, now has a new and improved interface.

In the 6/3/2014 update, the vendor (ProQuest / Serials Solutions) made several bug fixes that we had been eagerly awaiting. Even more importantly, the changes offer better layout, better integration with our library research guides (LibGuides), and context-sensitive librarian information on the results pages, among other things.

You can access Summon from the same places you always could.

  • from the “Library Quick Search” on the library main page: go/lib
  • from the Summon page: go/summon
  • or anywhere you find a Summon search widget on a library page

Friday Links, May 23, 2014

Fun and inspiring CSS examples and animation effects – Get inspired by the elegant use of CSS, CSS3, and jQuery or JavaScript in these examples. Also, learn about a fantastic new resource for brushing up on your CSS vocabulary.

Chronicle of Higher Education: Middlebury Faculty Seeks to Cut Ties With Online-Education Company.  In a nonbinding vote, professors overwhelmingly opposed a business venture with a company called K12 to sell online language courses to elementary and secondary schools.

Friday Links – May 2, 2014

At Middlebury, we’ve been using Summon as the discovery layer for our library collections for the last several years.  The recent article from the Chronicle of Higher Education about discovery tools is an interesting read:

As Researchers Turn to Google, Libraries Navigate the Messy World of Discovery Tools

Many professors and students gravitate to Google as a gateway to research. Libraries want to offer them a comparably simple and broad experience for searching academic content. As a result, a major change is under way in how libraries organize information. Instead of bewildering users with a bevy of specialized databases—books here, articles there—many libraries are bulldozing their digital silos. They now offer one-stop search boxes that comb entire collections, Google style.

That’s the ideal, anyway. The reality is turning out to be messier.

Read the rest of the article here

Ideal lengths of tweets, facebook updates, blog posts, etc. (Hint: facebook updates – really, really short)

Dartmouth Pops the Champagne as Basic Programming Language Turns 50 – Basic, the programming language that revolutionized computing by making it accessible to people beyond the worlds of science and engineering, turns 50 this week, and it’s getting a birthday party.

How the 5 hottest tech jobs are changing IT – The IT industry is shifting. Here are five jobs coming to the forefront and how they are transforming the IT department.

How to Delete Yourself from the Internet – You can make yourself “disappear” from the Internet. But be forewarned: Most of the following tactics are irreversible.

Flipped learning skepticism: Is flipped learning just self-teaching?