Have you considered using WordPress as a course website, but aren’t sure how it might look? Are you using it already, but curious about new ideas? Here’s a sneak peek at how other Middlebury faculty have been doing it.
Librarians at Middlebury have been creating research guides for many years, originally publishing them in print and then migrating to online platforms. Online guides have also changed format as new software has been developed. (see go/guides)
This summer we began a subscription to LibGuides by Springshare, which is used by many libraries throughout the world. This robust interface will allow us to be more flexible, and it enables us to create guides that are more user-friendly through the use of tabs and other navigational elements.
Though it will take us most of Fall semester to migrate all of our current guides, here’s one available right now: the Citation & Style Guide (go/citation), which helps students correctly cite sources and create bibliographies. It also contains a section on writing and plagiarism, including a link to the new Academic Honesty Tutorial recently developed by the College’s Honor Code Review Committee.
Check it out, and feel free to give us feedback!
New Animated PNG Creation Tools Intend To Bring APNG Into Mainstream Use: While grainy GIF images can have entertaining uses, they aren’t the ideal animated image format due to lack of full color support and an alpha channel [for varied transparency]. Animated PNG doesn’t have these faults and has been available and incorporated in quite a few browsers since roughly 2004.
10 ways tech support has changed since the 1980s: Over the past 30 years, IT has seen some monumental changes — and they’ve had a huge impact on the field of tech support. See if you remember the way it used to be.
Touch Laptop Forecasts: Only 10-15% of laptops sold this year will be touch-enabled. Sales of touch-enabled Dell and HP laptops are declining, but Lenovo’s touch laptops will be 50% of their sales in the next 2-3 years.
What to Expect in WordPress 3.7 and 3.8: The 3.7 update will come in October and feature better internationalization support while 3.8 is planned for the end of the year and will include an overhaul of the admin interface and a new Twenty Fourteen theme. If you have thoughts on improving the dashboard take their survey.
The New IE11 Developer Tools: Microsoft has improved the script debugger, added a memory analysis tool, and cleaned up the display of inherited styles in the DOM explorer.
uCSS and CSS Dig: Two tools that can be used to crawl a website and produce reports to help us clean up unused and redundant CSS declarations. This might be helpful in organizing our own stylesheets.
NPR’s Bob Mondello gave a nostalgic, sometimes humorous view of libraries last week: Libraries’ Leading Roles: On Stage, On Screen And In Song
Have online journals evolved beyond their readers? “… science has become abstracted away from practitioners. It has disappeared from the tangible world as journals have disappeared from tables, desks, and waiting rooms. …”
Google’s “Opt-out village” (from The Onion) –
Wiki Wars: The ten most controversial Wikipedia pages (from CNN)
Last Friday, LIS had plenty of representation at the First-Year ‘Student Services Fair,’ which was held concurrently with the Academic Forum in (a steamy hot)Kenyon Lobby. Mary Backus, Pij Slater, and I were there as staff members; Christine Wemette & Fernando Sandoval Jimenez represented the Helpdesk students. As first-year students came through Kenyon lobby after being at the Forum & stopped by a table to get information, they received a sticker for their “Road map to Student Services” flyer, which eventually led to an ice-cream reward. Continue reading
Do you need a rapid response to your library/research question? Try our new Ask-a-Librarian Chat Reference service.
Find this CHAT link on the Library page (go/lib) or on the Ask a Librarian page (go/askus)
Chat Reference is available during regular library walk-in reference hours.
And as the illustration shows, you may still contact us via text, email, or phone.
LIS will be conducting four focus groups of students, faculty, and staff on November 16 & 17, 2011. We would like feedback on the pros and cons of accessing & navigating certain pages on the LIS Website. Using the results, we hope to improve the website.
If you are interested in helping, please fill out this sign-up form. (Available dates and times are listed on the form.) Continue reading
Last year’s seniors (2010-2011) who submitted theses to include in our digital repository now have their work available in DSpace (go/dspace). Some students request that their work be restricted to the College community, so to view those, you’ll be asked to log in with your Midd username & password.The others are available ‘worldwide,’ and are eventually searchable via Google (etc.). Continue reading
Soon after the launch of the new Middlebury web site, the LIS website team conducted usability testing on the LIS parts of the site (see report 1, report 2). Many improvements have been made based on the feedback received during testing. Since part of the Team’s charge for this year included following-up on these recommendations, we thought it best to share some of the highlights. These changes were made with the help of many content managers and website editors; we thank you for your contributions!: Continue reading
