Users can now see today’s hours from the LIS web pages. The “All Hours” link takes users to the full Google Calendar, which has a pull-down menu for the various service points. More locations will be added in the coming days. Special thanks to the LIS Website Team, Carrie, and Ian for making this happen!
To give our colleagues a better idea of what’s changed in our web applications each week, we’ll be preparing this quick list for publication each Friday. Not all of the details of each change are included below, but we’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have in the comments.
Recently, several people have had issues uploading files to Drupal using Firefox. What happens is that, when you use Firefox to download a file, like a PDF, the server you download it from tells Firefox what type of file you’re downloading. Firefox then associates that file type with the file extension. A server might tell you that a PDF is the file type “application/x-download” instead of “application/pdf” and from then on Firefox will think that all PDFs are “application/x-download”s. This causes problems when you then try to upload a PDF to our site and your browser tells our server than you’re sending us a “application/x-download”, which we don’t want you to upload.
To resolve this, you need to delete a file called “mimeTypes.rdf” from your Firefox profile folder. See this guide to locating your profile folder. You only need to do this if you start experiencing this issue.
Drupal
Course Hub
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I’m excited to announce that, in partnership with the Film & Media department, a large majority of the Media Collection DVDs, which have been kept behind the Circulation Desk, will be moving out onto the main floor, and new loan rules will apply to them. These DVDs will be merged with the current Browsing DVDs, located between the New Books and Reference stacks, and will circulate to students and staff for 3 days, and to faculty for 2 weeks. They’ll be housed within new, locked cases, and when you check out the media, instead of having to locate the DVD itself from a shelf behind Circulation, LIS staff will simply unlock the case for you. In other words, yes, now you’ll be able to watch most of the DVDs Middlebury owns outside the library.
Additionally, we expect to have an “oversize” portion of the collection where the original DVD cases (e.g. some box sets, DVDs with irregular-sized booklets) are important for use or study, or can’t be easily transferred to the locking cases. This oversize section will be located behind the Circulation Desk, but the materials will circulate under the new loan rules and can leave the building.
Lastly, a smaller restricted collection of rare and/or expensive DVDs will continue to be kept behind Circulation and the old loan rules (students & staff 4 hours in-house, faculty 3 days) will still apply.
This new arrangement will not affect how Reserves works for faculty or students. When a professor asks to have a DVD put on Reserves for a course, LIS staff will retrieve the media from the open stacks/oversize/restricted, and it will be kept on Reserves, in the usual place behind Circulation and with the usual Reserves loan rules. At the end of the semester, when the media comes off of Reserves, it will be returned to wherever it came. (Note: videotapes, which have already been moved from behind Circ to open stacks on the main floor behind Government Documents, will work the same way.) However, since a more widely circulating media collection will result in more media being used away from the library and off campus, we encourage faculty to plan ahead for your Reserves needs, including film screenings.
This is a huge project for LIS, involving handling all the DVDs, and repackaging and reprocessing most of them. Not only most of the Media Collection DVDs, but also all of the Browsing DVDs will have to be repackaged. All “MCTR” DVDs, no matter where they will eventually be housed, will be reprocessed using the Library of Congress classification system, which we use currently for all books and some DVDs. The finished open stacks collection will be sorted by call number, not the current alphabetical arrangement used for Browsing. We plan to start work on all this in early June, and hope to be finished before Fall semester classes begin.
The book collections on the Main and Lower Levels of Davis Family Library have been rearranged in order to create room for the Music Library collections that will be moving later this month. Updated paper copies of the building guide are available at the Circulation and Info Desks, and you may see updated plans online at go/davismap
New compact shelving was installed in the SE corner of the lower level, and all of the books in the “stacks” (aka general collection shelves) were shifted toward Z. Therefor, if you’re used to finding your favorite PQ books in a specific spot, to find them now, keep following the alphabet toward Z until you run into them.
The Vermont Collection was moved to the middle of the lower level, as were the Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese Collections. The VHS collection was moved to open shelves in the center of the Main Lvl just east of the Government Documents.
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As you may or may not be aware, the Music Library will close its doors at 5 pm on May 17th. LIS would appreciate it if all Music Library items were returned before that time. After the 17th, Music Library materials can be returned to the Davis Family Library.
It is now possible to renew an ILL item from the ILLiad web pages:
From within ILLiad, select “Checked Out Items” from the menu on the left. Open the item you would like to renew by clicking on the request number. Click “Renew Request” at the top of the detailed information page to place the renewal request.
There is a limited window of opportunity for placing a renewal. Renewals can only be placed 10 day before the due date through one day beyond the original due date.
Items already identified as non-renewable will have no button. However, each renewal request is sent to the lender for review, and it is up to the lender to grant or decline our renewal request, so seeing the button in ILLiad is NOT a guarantee of a renewal.
ILL staff will update Millennium and ILLiad with the dates provided by the Lending Libraries, and e-mail patrons when a renewal has been denied. You can check the status of your renewal in ILLiad or in My MIDCAT
