Matthew Reidsma

Upcoming Web Updates

As the winter semester winds down, we have a few changes coming up on the web I want to remind you of:

Next week:

On Monday, 4/28 we will switch to Summon 2.0 as our default discovery interface. I’m working on customizing some things in the new tool, including:

• Request buttons for book requests will directly request the book, including crane items. This is something I cooked up that is kind of a hack. Basically it loads the catalog page for the book in the background and scrapes the request link off the page, replacing the link that Serials Solutions uses. I need to tweak a few things yet to make it work as expected when we have multiple holdings, etc.
• All colors updated to have appropriate contrast ratios to comply with accessibility guidelines. (Dear 21 year old designers: grey on grey is sure pretty but it unreadable.)
• Fix the help links on the home page. Since our custom link colors are white because the header is dark blue, on the Summon home screen the header is not shown but the links are. Because the background is white, the links are invisible.
• Swap out the tiny logo for a more readable one
• Make the chat button a reasonable size. What is with all these super tiny interface elements?
• Restyle the “Clear Filters” box to make it more obvious
• LibGuides will all have the right metadata to show up in Summon results. I’ll be working on this all week.

Illiad (Document Delivery) and Ares (Course Reserve) login changes

• Mary is moving these two services to GVSU’s CAS (Central Authentication Service). The nice part will be that if you log in to Document Delivery and then head over to Course Reserve or one of our databases, you won’t need to log in again, since they will all share login credentials. This should be a seamless transition, but the login screen will be different sometime early next week.

Instruction Menu and User Interface Pattern Library moving

• I’ll be switching the Instruction Menu and our UI Pattern Library over to the production server. All the old URLs will redirect, and it shouldn’t be noticeable.

Later this Summer

LibGuides Migration

We’re switching to the LibGuides 2.0 interface later this summer. The relevant dates are: * July 29th: Migrate data from LibGuides 1.0 into 2.0. At this point, we’ll stop updating the 1.0 site. * August 18th: LibGuides 2.0 will go live as our subject guides site. * I am working on customzing the LibGuides template, so some things look super wonky right now. I’ll get to them as soon as I can. I’ll post more details as the LibGuides committee works them out.

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to ask!