- When possible, add a note with the appropriate go/ short-cut to the headers of pages with go/ links, so folks will know how to get there again.
- Create an easy to find reverse gotionary–and, possibly category directory–of go/links, with all the items that currently have go/links. Sometimes it’s difficult to figure out what the go/ link could be.
Submitted by: J. Simmons.
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These are good ideas. A note posted this month at http://go.middlebury.edu says the ‘go’ site is currently being revamped. I’ll forward your suggestion to the site administrators and have them get back to you with any questions. Thanks!
For now, GO has returned to a simple redirection service. At some point, the GOtionary and other GO services may indeed be re-built and/or enhanced.
Look for updates at http://go.middlebury.edu
I’ll not be so vague. I’m working on redoing the GOtionary. The GO administration interface was originally intended for multiple site administrators and included all of these features:
* The ability to display offline messages for services.
* The ability to classify things in “types” so that, say, all of BannerWeb could be taken offline with a single click and the same message displayed for all sites.
* Statistics tracking for the number of people using each address.
* Server load balancing so that a single GO address could bounce between multiple front end servers for a service.
* Three tiers of administration, allowing us to specify who could do what with GO shortcuts.
In the end though, it turned out that Chris and I did 99% of all the administration on GO and none of the above features were every really used. Since all those features made the admin interface somewhat clunky to use, we did away with all the stuff we didn’t use for a much simpler system that lets us add/edit addresses much quicker.
The one feature we lost that people used was the GOtionary. Frankly, I like both of your suggestions, Jean. The first, however, would require us changing the site header, which can’t be done since it’s part of the global look-and-feel of the college online. This might be something to consider when we think about where we want to go with Middlebury’s online presence, perhaps (I hope) in a direction that lets us tie multiple information systems together to make finding stuff easier for folks. But that’s all future stuff.
What I think it much more doable is your second suggestion of the “reverse GOtionary”. The basic GOtionary will be much the same as it used to out of necessity: a list of links with some descriptions. What we can certainly do to make it easier to find things is include this content in a collection in our search application and provide a simple search interface on the GOtionary to let you look things up.
I’ll add that to my list of things-to-do and thanks for the suggestions.
I must have been part (or most) of the 1% that did use go/admin. When I knew I was going to take down ERes, Illiad, or Midcat for upgrades etc., I could go in and change it to display a message to that effect.
Granted this didn’t happen often, but it was convenient and allowed me to alert users in a very timely fashion without bothering Ian or Chris. I’m sorry that that feature has been lost.
I was also part of that 1%. In addition to what Mike L used it for, I also used it to change user alerts when changing EZProxy, CONTENTdm.