Matthew Reidsma

Work Notes

Updates from the GVSU Libraries’ Web Team. Archive // Subscribe: EmailRSS

Getting to My Account in EDS over FOLIO

There is only one thing that annoys me more than blog posts that begin, “Sorry it’s been so long since I’ve posted,” and that is years-long ILS and discovery migrations that lack basic features once you’ve signed all the contracts and overworked yourself and your colleagues and annoyed all of your users. Today, we have both.

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The Tale of the loathed Recall Button in the OPAC

This is an important update - please read it, especially if you work the desk or virtual services. Please also share with student employees who work with patrons.

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Sierra's My Lists Retirement Annoucement

It’s hard to believe, but we’ll be moving to a new discovery system in 3 short months. Once we switch from Summon to EDS, we will continue to have Sierra as our OPAC until Summer of 2021. Clicks on book records in EDS will take users to Sierra until we complete the switchover to FOLIO in the summer. (Something has to move the crane, right?)

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Real Time Occupancy Updates

Leading up to the Fall semester, we installed sensors that help us track the real-time occupancy of the Mary Idema Pew and Steelcase Libraries. The included software was designed to serve as a note to prospective visitors at an entrance as to whether they were allowed to enter or not, which doesn’t necessarily serve our purposes. A few weeks ago I built a little data collector and then started displaying real-time occupancy on the library homepage and a stand-alone page on the CMS.

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More Obvious Hours for Today

Since the Fall semester started, we’ve had significantly more traffic directly to our hours page (mostly from searches of “gvsu library hours”). Since today’s hours are on our every other web page across all our sites, we didn’t have as much traffic to the main hours page before, because the current hours were obvious and our previous research had shown that mot students were looking at hours for the current day. Well, now that many classes are online or hybrid, more students are looking ahead to plan our their weeks (or, at least that’s my working theory). Hence the increase in visits to our hours page.

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Embedding Help and Chat in LibGuides and Blackboard

For liaisons who are trying to find new ways to integrate library services into our LMS (Blackboard) or LibGuides to support newly online or hybrid classes, here’s a way to embed our library’s chat/search help widget into another website. Thanks to Debbie for reaching out with the question - I hope the answer is useful to others as well.

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The Gendered Chatbot

This weekend, GVSU released a virtual assistant app called myBlueLaker created by the start up n-powered, that allows users to type or speak questions about GVSU to get them information about their University presence (grades, registration information, etc.) as well as logistics (building hours, calendar, etc.) all in one place. I downloaded it this morning so I could make sure all the library related stuff was accurate.

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Real Time Occupancy on the homepage

Some of you may have seen a few links that appeared on the homepage a few weeks ago to see the real time occupancy of both the Mary Idema Pew and Steelcase libraries. If you, like most people, looked at them on a phone, you might have been a little confused and thought you were having a stroke. You weren’t. Once again a vendor was selling us a product from 2003 at 2020 prices.

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Better MelCat help in Summon

As part of my larger push to make it easier to move from our GVSU search tools to MeLCat, I added a little function to my custom Summon scripts that inserts a contextual help tip if you have the Book/eBook facet selected. (If you have more than one facet selected, it will show if the Book/eBook facet is the top one checked in the list. ¯(ツ)/¯ (Perhaps I’ll dig into the Angular framework enough to make a more sophisticated solution down the line.)

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A better no results screen in the Catalog

Every now and then, when I’m not at work, I do a search in the Catalog that returns no results. For some reason, the folks who made WebPAC Pro thought the best place to go when you don’t get results in the Advanced Search screen. To quote Andromeda Yelton, who was just as frustrated as I have been about this screen, “if I didn’t get any original hits from my search, limiting it to large print Albanian will not help.” Because I always encounter this page in a context where I am not working, I have never managed to write down that this page needed to be fixed. Until now!

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ILLiad to MeLCat updates

A few years ago, I added a feature to ILLiad, our interlibrary load software, that searched the Michigan eLibrary catalog (MeLCat) for books that were being requested from ILL. If a MeL participating library owned the book, I’d post a nice little notice to the user to let them know they could get the book faster through MeL. (It would also be cheaper for us.) Here’s what it looked like:

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Usability Test Roundup, October 2019

Yesterday Melina and I ran our first formal usability test in nearly 2 years. We had three students in the Mary I who worked on a few tasks using the Omeka-based Digital Collections site. We had a great crowd of observers who took meticulously detailed notes and helped us whittle down a very long list of issues to a few high-priority action items for the immediate future.

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Goodbye, Summon book detail page. We hardly knew ye.

Recently, there was some discussion on a list serv about a new way to streamline requesting books in our catalog from the Summon results page. The workflow for requesting a book in Summon is a little click heavy, where the user clicks on the book result and is presented with the Summon book detail page, then they click on the “Request” button, where they are taken to the catalog page (and no request is placed), and finally, they request the book in the catalog. The new workflow promised to actually execute the hold from the Summon request button.

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Turning off Summon's Topic Explorer sidebar

As many of you know, I have been working for a few years researching bias in our library discovery tool, Summon. After I returned from sabbatical, I sent a proposal to Leadership Team that we turn off the Summon sidebar, the area on the right side of larger screens that shows the Topic Explorer, related topics, related LibGuides and librarians, and other contextual information. The proposal has been approved by both Leadership Team and many of the liaison librarians I have spoken with. I shut off the Summon sidebaron March 4th, the first day of Spring Break.

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ProQuest Platform Downtime

On Saturday, January 19th starting at 10pm EST, ProQuest will be conducting maintenance on many of its platforms. Many of our subscription systems will have periods of unavailability overnight. The maintenance is expected to last up to 8 hours.

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Course Reserve Redesign Updates

The redesign for Course Reserve will be going live this Thursday morning, July 5th! Course Reserve will get the shiny new template, as well as a bunch of workflow improvements for faculty who want to manage their own courses. You can see the new design (with some limited functionality - you can’t actually get to the items that are on reserve) at https://gvsu.ares.atlas-sys.com/ares/TestWeb

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June Web Redesign Updates

All summer long I’ve been working on redesigning all of our library web systems (except for Summon and ScholarWorks) in order to match the University’s new branding campaign and improve the overall accessibility of our sites. In late April, four of our GVSU-hosted websites switched over to the new design. (The fifth—Services for Faculty and Staff—was absorbed into the main library website.) In May, I redesigned the Library Catalog, EZ Proxy’s error pages, and upgraded our link resolver to 360 Link 2.0. In addition, I built a tool that allows us to put our library hours into all of our other systems! You may remember that I’ve done a lot of user research on how users get to our hours, and it’s one task that has evolved continuously since I started here. Earlier in June, I redesigned the Journal Finder. And since then I’ve been hard at work on other systems!

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Redesign updates, testing 360 Link

I’ve been hard at work updating the first three external systems to our new web template. EZProxy quietly went live last week. Hopefully you won’t notice! It will only show up if there is a problem. ERMS and I have been testing the link resolver for over a week, and below I have details on how you can test it from the comfort of your own computer before it goes live, May 24th. And the catalog is coming along, but there are so many moving parts I will have a few more days of tinkering before I can start testing.

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Sabbatical Leave Book Project Update

I’m hard at work on the research for the book I’ll be writing about algorithmic bias this Fall. I thought I’d do a quick update on how things are going for those who are interested!

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CMS 4.1 Template Migration Begins Tomorrow

Tomorrow morning we will be moving a few sites to the new CMS 4.1 template:

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Summer 2018 Library Website Template Updates

This summer, I will be migrating all of our library web tools to a new template to match the current Grand Valley State University branding campaign. This migration is necessary to address accessibility issues with our current template, and to take advantage of new administrative features and customizations in the GVSU Content Management System (CMS). Since many of our tools are designed t look like our main website, the project will proceed in phases to enable us to meet Institutional Marketing’s timetable while not disrupting student work. I have been drafting project plans for each stage of the process, which are posted in LINK under TIS > Systems & Technology Project Forms > CMS 4.1 Migration. Currently, plans for the April stages are posted, and the rest will be added as we finish planning the details of each stage and working with project partners.

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LibGuides, Images, and HTTPS

In a few weeks, Google Chrome will release version 61 of its web browser, which will flag all sites that have forms that load over an insecure HTTP connection as “Insecure” sites. What kind of site has a form and probably loads over HTTP, you ask? Nearly every library webpage ever! Luckily, Mary Morgan and I have been scrambling for the past month to make sure we’re ready when Chrome updates. (All of the other browsers will follow suit shortly, plus pover 60% of our users are on Chrome.) All of our online services (except for ScholarWorks, which is hosted and out of our control) not support HTTPS. Many also force HTTPS connections, but not all our services currently allow us to do that (cough Summon and The Catalog cough).

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LibGuides is now loaded over HTTPS

At long last, we’ve finally switched one of our most used tools, LibGuides, over to HTTPS. This is especially important as Chrome is releasing a new version of its browser next month that will flag every webpage loaded without HTTPS (i.e. every library webpage ever) that also has a form as “Insecure.” (Over 60% of our users use Chrome, and all other browsers will follow suit.) We’ve worked hard to earn our users’ trust, so we don’t want a browser update to undo that.

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Course Reserve Instructor UI updates

This week I’ve made some small (but hopefully effective) changes to the user interface of the Instructor side of our Course Reserves website. Todd, Brian, Kristin, Mary Morgan, and I have been working to improve the workflow of faculty adding items to Course Reserves over the past few months, and we’ve made some headway with other user interface changes as well as the addition of a whole category of help topics for faculty.

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Website Updates, Summer 2017

On Monday we migrated to LibInsight, the replacement tool for LibAnalytics. I’ve sat down with most of you to make sure bookmarks and such were updated, and I’ve likely explained some of the new features of the tool. Right now, all of the data we have in LibInsight has been manually recorded (Instruction statistics, reference consultations, desk questions, tours, etc.) In the future we hope to collect and share more data, such as database usage, search tool usage, and so on. Having this data in one place will help folks make better decisions about collection development, and also help with our public data sharing initiatives (like the Library by the Numbers page) by automatically sharing relevant and up-to-date data. (The LBTN page is already a year and a half out of date at least.)

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LibAnalytics migration updates

We’ve been using LibAnalytics for a few years, but Springshare has a new and improved version we decided to upgrade to this summer: LibInsight. LibInsight offers some features not found in the older tool, like automatic harvesting of COUNTER data through the SUSHI protocol (yes, that sentence is a real thing and not something out of an episode of Dr. Who), integration with LibApps, and unlimited datasets.

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Journal Finder Updates Coming Soon

A few of our tools have updates that we’d like to take advantage of, and now that Spring/Summer semester is upon us, we’re preparing to test and roll out these upgrades. The schedule for updates is currently:

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Upcoming Summon Improvements on July 26

The Summon user interface will get an update on July 26th. Below is information about the changes, as well as details on how to preview them. Please let me know if you have any questions.

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LibChat Updates

Springshare released a few updates to LibChat and LibAnswers today, which is the tool we use to power our chat widget with integrated self-help features. Since many of you have LibChat accounts connected to chat widgets on your LibGuides, and others use chat at the UX desk perch, I wanted to share these updates with you.

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Course Reserve Updates

Yesterday I met with Kristin, Todd, Mary M, and Brian to work on improving faculty workflows in Ares, our Course Reserve software. The Course Reserves team is bogged down with lots and lots of manual requests to enter content and classes, and we need to do something to improve the situation. We did a user journey exercise, which involves walking through every step in a user’s attempts to complete a task, exploring confusing labeling and instructions, and what happens when you click something unexpected. We didn’t get very many post-its up on the board before we were drowing in issues to work on.

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OPAC Renewal and Login Updates

I’ve been noticing some reports lately of folks who thought they had renewed items in the catalog expressing frustration at receiving bills for overdue and lost items (including some very rude messages to our long-suffering UX team). From what I can tell, these folks all clicked the “Renew All” or “Renew Selected” items on the catalog account screen, but failed to notice the second confirmation screen that follows:

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Summon Updates for May 3

This is from the Summon Listserv today, on some upcoming changes to Summon:

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Status App on a New Server

Last week, we moved the Status app to a new home on our new server. We’ve redirected all the old links for now, and are working on updating the links in the footer of every site throughout the Library. You shouldn’t experience any issues with the app on the new server, but if you do, let us know!

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More security updates on the web

This week I’ve taken the step to move a bit more of our library traffic to HTTPS, ensuring that our patron’s visits to our website are sent with encryption. The most recent update is that Summon now sends users to the catalog over HTTPS. And in a few weeks, users routed to the link resolver for articles will also be sent over HTTPS. (It takes a few indexing cycles for the link resolver change to catch up.)

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LibAnswers now stores patron data encrypted

Kudos to Springshare for the latest update to LibAnswers, which drives the GVSU Self-help site. Patron information is now stored encrypted. This is great, because the site has been storing email addresses and SMS numbers of patrons who need help.

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HTTPS on the Library website

Yesterday Institutional Marketing made a change to our website that will help support our users’ privacy. All traffic to the library website (and sub-websites) at gvsu.edu/library will now use HTTPS, which means that traffic from our servers to our users’ computers is now encrypted, rather than being sent in plain text. HTTPS isn’t necessarily a privacy solution, but, as the Library Digital Privacy Pledge states, it is a prerequisite for digital privacy. Since the third article of the ALA Code of Ethics is protecting user privacy, this helps us take the first step to implement a way for our users to conduct research that is immune from eavesdropping.

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Call Number Browse in the Catalog

This afternoon I pushed out a small change to the Library catalog that brings back the ability to see items that would be nearby on the shelf. Now, in both the keyword search results screen and the bibliographic records screens, call numbers are links. Clicking the call number link will bring you to an LC Call number browse screen for nearby items.

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Accessible Search Forms in LibGuides

This morning I added a new page to the Web Content Guides, based on something I’ve been working on in LibGuides: accessible HTML code for all of our common search tools!

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Summon Updates, 12/15/2016

Today ProQuest is pushing out a big update to Summon, our discovery layer. Below is a summary of the changes (with some slight commentary from me). You can read the detailed release notes on ProQuest’s site. In the new year, KARMS and I will be looking over the new options available for recommending items, and we’ll be reaching out to folks in R&I and UX to help us improve our users’ search experience. If you have any questions, let me know!

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Web Content Style Guide and Upcoming Workshops

Over the past year, I’ve been auditing the content on all of our websites, including LibGuides, to make sure that the content was correct and up-to-date as well as accessible for all our users. (Mary M helped me on the home stretch as we finished fixing over 1000 broken links in LibGuides last year, for instance.) Since we have so many content creators now, I realized that we needed some easily accessible and scannable guidelines for creating useful, accessible content.

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Slight change to 360 Link

Last week, Gayle was reading over something I’d written about the redesign of our link resolver, and she mentioned that students don’t always see the additional results that are hidden in an accordion if the “best bet” link fails to work. She described how students would click on the big blue button and would not end up on the full text of the article they wanted. Most would understand to go back to the tab with the link resolver, but often, she said, students would not see that they had more options for the full text, and she would have to show them how to click the “Show more results” link.

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LibGuides Subject Listing Tweak

This afternoon while waiting for Springshare to respond to a support ticket, I finally wrote a little script to fix one of my pet peeves about the LibGuides homepage list. When there is only one subject guide for a given subject, users still have to click on the subject name and then see the single guide appear below the heading, and then click again on the guide list. I’ve always thought that if there was only one guide, then the heading should just take you right to that guide. So, I wrote a script that does just that.

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Summon Customizations are Back

A few weeks ago, ProQuest updated the user interface of Summon, our discovery tool. Since we had mad many customizations to Summon, I’ve spent the past few weeks rewriting all of these GVSU-specific features for the new interface. Late last week, the new code went live, and you should now see the GVSU Library chat button, improved styling on the header, on the ‘clear filters’ link, as well as on the ook detail page request buttons, among other tweaks. If you find anything else that needs updating, or if you have any questions, please let us know!

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Summon user interface update

Next week Wednesday, August 24th, ProQuest will be launching a “refreshed” user interface for Summon, our discovery layer. Since I have made a lot of customizations to Summon, and since those modifications will likely need to be rewritten for the new interface, we will be removing our Summon customizations Today, Friday, August 19th. No functional change to Summon will happen, although some design elements and labeling will change.

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Illiad Account Reminder

Shortly after I started at GVSU Libraries, Vicki mentioned to me that there was a real issue every semester with Illiad users who had moved or changed phone numbers not updating their information. Most students assume that updating their address and phone number in Banner is enough to trickle throughout the University system, but unfortunately, some of our systems are little islands of their own, including Illiad. We’d bounced around a few ideas here and there in the past (including one really complex system I dreamed up while driving through the Smoky Mountains after a conversation with Jason Griffey), but I finally realized recently that it might just be a nudge that could help deal with these issues. Most of the time a users GVSU email doesn’t change, but for distance students who get books mailed to them, updating their address can mean the difference between receiving their book and having it vanish into the ether.

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New Summon UI Coming August 24th

ProQuest is releasing a slightly new user interface to the Summon 2.0 service on August 24th. Mostly this involves some cleanup of the header, facet, and right-side panels. Below is an email I received this morning from the product manager outlining some of these changes, as well as scheduling webinars to learn more about the updates. I am going to register for the webinar on Tuesday, August 9th, and will reserve a room if anyone wants to join me. Please keep an eye out for an invitation I’ll send out later today. You are welcome to register for any of the other sessions on your own.

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Summon Status Updates

This morning the ProQuest/Ex Libris juggurnaut launched a new real-time status tool for Summon, our discovery layer. I know that the ERMS team and I will be monitoring this status tool closely, but wanted to let everyone know about it in case you wanted to subscribe to keep up-to-date on Summon issues, releases, and down times.

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LibGuides Asset Cleanup

I’ve been working over the past few weeks at cleaning up LibGuides assets, and wanted to give you an update.

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The Unbearable Lightness of Vendor Security

A few years ago, Eric Hellman wrote a great piece about library catalog privacy leakage. He showed that because library catalogs transmit data over HTTP connections (rather than over secure, encrypted HTTPS connections), anyone in between the user’s computer and the OPAC server can intercept information about the book record that user was looking at. For his example of the New York Public Library, that included automatically sharing the user’s data with the following for-profit companies:

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Feedback needed for UX and Discovery aspects of cloud-based LMSs

Some of you may have heard about the Shared Cloud-based Request for Proposals group that a few of us in TIS have been working on for the past few months. I’m servings as the chair of the User Experience and Discovery subgroup as we write the RFP, and my group and I have created a draft of the questions we’re planning on asking the vendors related to how our users will interact with the system. We’ve tried to cover the usual aspects of usability, functionality, and customizations, while also pushing the vendors to account for data security and user privacy. I’d love to get your feedback on the draft so far, letting me know if we’ve missed something or whether something we’ve written isn’t clear. While I’ve sent the draft to the steering committee for the RFP, we haven’t heard much feedback and we want to make sure we’re not missing anything.

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Making it Easier to Get Books from MeLCat

Today I made a few changes to our online tools that make it easier for our users to get material we don’t own. It’s long been hard to direct users who are looking for books we don’t have to MeLCat, our Michigan consortial catalog, and to Document Delivery (Interlibrary Loan). While the catalog has a button to search for items in MeLCat, and the copy for failed searches prompts to search MeLCat, there hasn’t ever been anything stopping folks from manually requesting items from Document Delivery when they could have gotten them much faster through MeLCat. (MeLCat also saves us money, so there is an internal motivation to make this change, too).

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Improving Summon's Topic Explorer

Summon’s Topic Explorer shows relevant reference material in the right-hand pane to users doing broad searches. The location of this content is getting more useful as Google adds more and more features to it’s Knowledge Graph, which shows relevant information (including reference content, store hours and traffic, content from Gmail and calendar and more). In the past, the right-hand side of a page was largely ignored by users, since it was the home of banner ads and other useless bits of content (and it still is in many places). But Google’s push to take back the right side pane means our users are more and more likely to see content there, especially when searching. So it’s never more important that we get things like Topic Explorer right.

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LibGuides Links Updated

Last week Bob reported a broken catalog search in LibGuides. The search still worked, but it was limiting to the Annis Water Resource Institute. When Patrick looked at the URL, he realized that the link was limiting the scope of the search to Annis, by prefacing the search query request with ~S17. (17 is the value of Annis in the scope field in Sierra.) If you wonder why anyone would scope a catalog search to a place with hardly any holdings, you should know that when we added a few scopes a year or so ago, Sierrra changed the “All holdings” scope from ~S17 to ~S19. (Why they don’t make ~S1 the All holdings scope is beyond me. Making it the last scope means that every time we add a scope the All Holdings scope will change.)

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Server issues redux

The past few weeks we’ve had a lot of issues with the tools the library builds to improve our user’s experiences using our various tools: custom styles and scripts for the OPAC, our discovery layer, course reserve, interlibrary loan, the link resolver, and more. Kyle, Mary, Patrick, and I want to thank you for all the reporting you’ve done to let us know when problems arise. Here’s where we stand now in our push to improve the performance of our tools.

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More Server Problems

The past few weeks we’ve been experiencing a lot of sluggishness of the library online tools. As I’ve written about before, this is because our servers are the computer equivalent of a bologna sandwich. We thought we had the issues resolved, but we’ve continued receiving reports of problems and downtime. I’ve been spending most of my time the past few weeks trying to solve this, and wanted to update you on what I’ve done so far.

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Sluggishness and Downtime from Last Week Resolved

You may have noticed some sluggishness on the library’s online systems last week. LibGuides, Summon, the Database A-Z list, 360Link, and the catalog were all having trouble loading the files I’ve created to customize and improve the vendor user interfaces. These files are all hosted on a virtual server which we rent from Dreamhost, a commercial hosting company. The library doesn’t have any actual web servers on campus to support the work of our team, and so we’ve been hosting our tools off-site for a few years. Unfortunately, the number of customizations and tools that we’ve built to make our users’ experience of the library better was too much for our servers, and we were experiencing repeated server crashes from the demand. The digital displays throughout the Mary Idema Pew library, the statistics gathering tools used by UX and that run automatically in the background letting us know how folks use our spaces, the customization scripts that modify almost a dozen commercial tools as well as our home-grown applications like the status app were causing our lone production server to run out of memory regularly.

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New ASRS Request Workflow is Live

Just before the break, Mary M and I were planning on switching the workflow for users who request items from the ASRS. The old reasons for having different workflows no longer applied, and it was more important to us now to have a consistent experience for our users, regardless of where the item they needed was housed. Once we got back from the holiday break, we got to work on making the changes.

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Upcoming ASRS Request Changes

As we get ready to head into the long break, I wanted to give you all a heads-up to a change Mary M. and I will be making to the OPAC when we get back. Specifically, we’ll be changing the workflow for users requesting items from the ASRS.

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Mary I in 2015

It’s been a gloomy and rainy few days through Exam Cram, so rather than an update about computer code, I thought I’d share a few of my favorite photos of the Mary I library I took coming in to work over the past year. Enjoy!

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RefWorks Flow Updates Coming Soon

This came across the Summon listserv today:

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Exam Cram Hours Tweaks

Every year we have problems communicating our exam cram hours especially at Mary I. Some days we are open 24 hours, others we are open all day but then we close at midnight, or maybe 2am. (And if we’re open all day but close at 2am, do we say that this 2am is on the day we were open or the following day?)

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A Little Extra Help in the Catalog

A few things have popped up in the catalog this week, and they all have something in common: they are little “modal” windows that appear after you click certain buttons. Here’s why they’ve arrived:

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Computer Availability Map Rewrite and Usage Data

A few days ago, I rewrote the Computer Availability map . (The code is available on Github.) Over the summer, Institutional Marketing and IT made some changes and audited the system that gives us the data we use to build the map, so we needed to make a few changes to reflect those differences. In addition, I brought the public view of the map up into the new CMS4 template, so that it matches all of our other sites. The map is linked again from the Services Page, under the Technology heading. (Or you can find it at gvsu.edu/library/computers).

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New OPAC Login Screen Coming Next Week

This week I did a little work on the OPAC login screen, which I will push live on Monday. We’ve long had the issue of having users choose between 2 different login screens, although the vast majority (well over 99% of active users) need the GVSU login. I designed a new login screen that defaults to asking for GVSU credentials, but allows Visitors or Alumni to switch to the alternate login method. The original screen and redesigned screen are below:

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OPAC Holding Page Updates

For the past few years, whenever Community Read gets into full swing, we get reports of the same issue in the catalog, specifically with the record for the Community read book. Whenever a record has more than 10 holdings, Sierra displays the first 10 but then adds a button to let users see the complete list of items. The first 10 work great, and my scritps that reformat the availability table work fine on them. However, when you get to the full list, there is no request button. It appears you can’t request any of the additional items! (You can, because despite having a request button at each holding, Sierra makes you choose the item you’d like later, something I have not dealt with yet.) Well, today I had an idea of how we might fix this issue.

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The Trials and Tribulations of the Hours on the Homepage

As many of you might remember, we’ve been having a load of trouble with the hours module since we moved over to the new version of the webteam’s CMS this fall. At the heart of the problems is the difference between what people mean when they say “today,” and what computers mean by “today.” Since the Mary Idema Pew Library is open until 2am most nights, we consider 2am to be part of the previous day’s operating hours. For us, that’s not hard to grasp. If we say that Monday’s hours are from 7:30am until 2am, we know that if it’s 1:30am on Tuesday, Monday’s hours still apply.

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MeL and MeLCat downtime

I just learned today that MeLCat and the MeL Databases will be migrating to a new server later this year, and there will be some downtime for these services. This usually means that a service is unavailable from midnight until 2am on a weekend, but in this case, MeLCat will be down for a while:

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Website Updates are (mostly) Done!

Well, it was a long day but the major parts of the catalog have been moved over and tweaked (even the nasty Advanced Search page). Illiad and Ares have moved over to the new template. And I even found a bit of time to redo the Library Labs page to highlight some of the cool tools we have available.

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Website migration updates

It’s been a busy day, but the biggest chunk of our systems have been switched over to the new CMS4 template. Here’s what we have so far:

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Catalog Template Updates

I’ve spent the past few days working on the catalog redesign, and thought I’d show you the most important pages. As always, let me know what you think! (The catalog will get switched over on Tuesday next week). Astute observers (I’m looking at Debbie here) will likely notice that I still haven’t changed the ASRS label that we ran usability tests on last spring. That’s because we still haven’t decided what to switch it to! However, the code is in place once we get the best combination on nouns and verbs to make a quick switch.

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New 360Link Template

This morning I finished the new template for 360link, our link resolver. Since 360link takes 24 hours to push updates live, the new link resolver will be live next Tuesday, 8/25. Let me know if you have any questions!

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LibGuides Template Updates

Today I finished redesigning the LibGuides templates for the new CMS migration. I’ve taken some screen shots of what all of the various pages will look like once we go live next week Monday (8/24). Here are the most common ones. As always, let me know if you have any questions.

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Summon Relevance Ranking Updates Scheduled for 8/18

This just came through on the Summon list serv, regarding changes to the Summon relevancy ranking:

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Journal Finder Update

One of the tools I’ve never redesigned is the journal finder. For this switch to the new Template, I had planned to do the journal finder after all of the other systems were in place. However, I went in today to do some testing for when I get ready to make changes and discovered that I couldn’t roll back to the old, non-redesigned version!

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Summon Event Statistics, 2014-15

This morning Jeff asked me for a report on the past year’s worth of Summon interactions. When we moved to Summon 2.0, I started tracking all of our events in Google Analytics, rather than in our home-grown statistics tracker. Looking over the report was quite interesting, so I thought I would share it with you all. You’ll see some entries that look awfully similar, (contentType vs ContentType) because sometimes the Summon interface is inconsistent with how the code displays the different features. Anyway, this PDF report shows the top 50 events in Summon over the past year. (There were a total of 368,918) The #1 event, “page”, is triggered whenever someone scrolls to the bottom of the page to load more results. Let me know if you have any questions or want to see more details about a particular result.

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Major Website Updates: CMS4 Migration and more

This is a long post about a huge project I’ve been working on for the past few months. The tl;dr is: the template for all of our websites is changing slightly in the next few weeks.

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What I did on my summer vacation: the creation of the GVSU Libraries knowledge base

This summer we were lucky to have Kathy Kosinski, a student at the University of Michigan’s iSchool, intern with us to work on the creation of a new knowledge base/self-help system for our users. Kathy spent 9 weeks combing through our data, talking with librarians and staff, writing copius amounts of documentation, and even playing a practical joke on me. It was great to work with her, and she’ll be missed. When she graduates in 2016, any library would be lucky to hire her.

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Databases removed from LibGuides

Jeff has already removed the databases (and RefWorks) that we are canceling from the Database A-Z list, but there were still a number of links in unpublished guides and elsewhere that had never been mapped to the official Database A-Z list. I’ve now removed all link assets in LibGuides that point folks to the canceled databases and RefWorks. I did, however, leave all of the training documents and handouts for RefWorks workshops and the like, so be sure to double check your own guides if you publish a long-dormant guide this Fall!

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OPAC 856 Link Updates

Yesterday I made some changes to the way the 856 field links appeared in the catalog. Ben pointed out to me that journal records often have a lot of 856 links, so the page ended up looking like a stack of blue bricks scrolling on forever! I changed the styles a bit and made the first link the blue block, and then made the rest of the links appear to be a list underneath, sort of how the link resolver results are styled. Since Jeff’s team ranks the database links in the OPAC, this made perfect sense. The first link probably is the best!

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Summon Updates coming Thursday, 6/25

ProQuest has just released details about Thursday’s Summon release, and it contains a few things we’ve been waiting for.

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OPAC Changes

Today I made a few small changes to the catalog that I want you to know about. They are:

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Illiad Home Page Tweaks

A while back, Vicki pointed out that our redesigned Illiad home page hid some helpful microcopy if a patron didn’t have any active requests. In the articles and books tables, we had notes explaining that articles are available for 14 days after they are received, and that renewed books won’t show back up in your account until the renewal is processed (due to OCLC’s wonky renewal process). When I cleaned up the home page for folks with no active requests, I inadvertently hid those little help messages, which led to some patron confusion.

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Summon's Two Request Buttons

Yesterday I got a few reports that Summon is putting two request buttons on our book detail pages, each with different functionality. One requests the book from the catalog. The other places an ILL request. The problem is that they LOOK IDENTICAL and the HAVE THE SAME LABEL.

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Updated Course Reserve Homepage for Faculty

A few months ago, I worked with Todd to make the Course Reserve home screens for Instructors and students easier to use, especially at the beginning of a semester when no classes are attached to a user’s account. Patty and Todd were working with an instructor yesterday who found that our redesigned home screen didn’t allow instructors to view their classes from past semesters. So, I added that button back in:

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Knowledge Base Update: Interaction Data

This summer, our UX Intern, Kathy, has been working on getting the GVSU Knowledge Base off the ground. For the first stage of her project, she analyzed our library’s interaction data for the past year, looking for patterns of common questions or problems so we could provide better help and support. I asked her to write up a summary of her findings along with the categorized data to share, since this kind of information is most useful when everyone has access to it. Let us know if you have any questions!

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Failed Renewals and Bad Error Messages

Last week, our UX intern Kathy asked me about the message the OPAC shows when a renewal fails. She had uncovered a lot of questions around renewals, particularly from chat, were the item wasn’t able to be renewed because it had been recalled or the user had already reached the renewal limit. I did some testing this morning, and discovered that the OPAC did show an “error” message, but it was hidden from the patron. Of course, even when I make this “error” message visible, it isn’t super useful. Can you find it below?

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New Database A-Z List is Live!

This morning we went live with our new LibGudies Database A-Z list. I discovered that a lot of database links in LibGuides are still pointing to the old Database list, so I’ve had Institutional Marketing keep those links active until I can fix all the links in LibGuides. (So far I’ve remapped 318 by hand.) It’ll take me a few weeks, but by the end we should have most of the links mapped over.

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LibGuides Advisory Committee Meeting Minutes, 4/14/2015

Yesterday the LibGuides Advisory Committee (Gayle, Hazel, Kim, Beth, Betsy, Kristin, and me) met to talk about a few things, and I wanted to give you an update:

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Usability Test Roundup, April 2, 2015

For various reasons, we haven’t run a usability test in quite a while. But this morning we had 2 students come in to run our new LibGuides Database A-Z page through the paces. I also had them work through some scenarios on retrieving books while looking at paper wireframes, to better understand how to display location information for items in the retrieval system.

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Better Course Reserve for Students

Last week I updated the Course Reserve home screen for faculty to help them get their classes set up when they were presented with a blank screen. Today I did the same for students. Here’s the before and after:

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Database A-Z List Migration & Usability

Work note about A-Z migration

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Chat Button Updates

LibChat Chat Button Upgrade

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Better Course Reserve for Faculty

Todd came to me today about an issue he’s had in [Course Reserves](https://gvsu.edu/library/ereserve]. When a faculty member logs in and doesn’t have any classes entered in Ares, they just get a screen with a few empty tables, and often aren’t sure what to do. A few years back we had a similar problem with Document Delivery, so Todd and I agreed to try the same fix on Course Reserves. I found a much easier way to do this, and so I spent a few minutes making the changes this afternoon. Now, instead of empty tables, users with no classes will be prompted to add their classes, along with a brief description of Course Reserve and some other options (for the folks who prefer to have our staff fill in the information for them). Here’s the new page:

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Illiad Error Screen Updates

A few weeks ago, Vicki tipped me off to some very confusing screens in Illiad that I’d missed when I did the last content audit of that system. When a user had problems with their account, they would see either a “blocked” screen or a “disavowed” screen. (Yes, Illiad tells people they are disavowed.) The only information the user had to go on besides these rather dramatic sounding judgments was to call the Document Delivery office between 8-5, Monday through Friday.

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New Additions to the GVSU Web World

Last week, 2 new things appeared in the GVSU web universe! After two long years of planning and work and then replanning and more work and doing a little more planning and some more work, the Special Collections and University Archives site has been redesigned! Nancy and Annie have worked hard on getting content into the new site, and it looks great. Max was a big help, too, as we worked out the technical details, but he went to work somewhere else before we could launch the site. Anyway, have a browse through these unique collections, and let us know what you think!

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LibGuides 2.0 Asset Changes

LibGuides Asset Changes

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LibGuides Advisory Committee Meeting Minutes, February 2015

Here are the minutes from the last LibGuides Advisory Committee Meeting1 (Friday, February 6):

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Web Updates, February 2015

Hello all! Here are a few quick updates for the web you might be interested in:

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LibGuides Database Descriptions Updates

Our database listings in LibGuides are kind of a mess.

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New Chat Platform Rollout

Exam Cram is almost done, and we’re winding down another semester. This is usually the time for us Web folks to update things and make changes, scrambling to improve things before the Winter semester gets in gear. But this year will be a little slower. No major changes, save one: we’ll be switching the service that we use to provide live chat from libraryh3lp to Springshare’s LibChat.

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Database Trials

Because sometimes the homepage ad for database trials doesn’t appear, I had Institutional Marketing add a banner to the Database table directing folks to the Database trials. If you need an easy way to direct folks, just send them to the Databases page and tell them to click the button in the yellow box.

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The Right Tools

Sometimes the best searches require that you use specific keywords in specific tools. We have a way to create scoped searches when the scopes are for things like location, content types, or language, but no good way to allow a patron to enter some keywords while also scoping a search to a specific keyword. That was the problem Elizabeth came to me with, since she needed a way to scope catalog searches to atlases. The best way to find atlases in the catalog was with the keyword “atlas” plus whatever additional keywords make sense. So I wrote a little script that checks a submitted form for a specific keyword (in this case, “atlas”) and if it doesn’t find it, appends it to the rest of the keywords. Here it is in action:

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October 2014 Project Updates

Since July I have only been on campus Tuesday through Thursday, and that schedule continues until January. However, I’ve still got a lot going on. It’s time for my monthly project update!

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RIP Real-time Laptop and iPad Availability

Today I removed the real-time technology lending screen from the website. The only way we had to get that data was to load the records in the catalog and scrape the data off the page, then display it in the table for users. This was slow and prone to break, and recently it has broken so often that I can’t keep up with fixing it. After Patrick and I checked the usage, we noticed that the page had only been viewed 120 times this year. That includes, of course, all the times I loaded it while testing. (For reference, there have been over 250,000 pageviews of other pages that aren’t search tools, so real-time technology availability is about 0.048% of all visits.)

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LibGuides Homepage Subject Link Simplification

Bob and Lindy reported an issue to me last week about the new LibGuides homepage list that because really clear when they were doing instruction sessions. When a user expanded a subject in the LibGuides list, the saw not only links to the relevant guides, but also a blue box with a link to the “Subject” landing page and the subject expert. It turns out that folks really want to click the links in the blue box, rather than the links to the guides. Bob and Lindy asked me to hide the links, and I have. We’ve never had them before, and I’m not convinced they serve out patrons. If you think they need to be reinstated with some better usability cues, let me know and we can bring it to the LibGuides committee.

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Link Resolver RefWorks Export icon, RIP

In our effort to push folks to new citation managers since we’ll be dropping RefWorks next summer, I turned off the “Export to Refworks” functionality in the link resolver. You can see that the RefWorks icon is no longer at the end of the citation:

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LibGuides Help

The LibGuides Committee and I have been trying to find a way to schedule help sessions, but the beginning of the semester is not the best time to squeeze in more commitments. So, while we wait for our workloads to lighten up, I’ll be checking in with all the LibGuides owners individually to see what kind of help I can give you, one-on-one.

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Library Status App Updates

I made a few updates to the Library Status app this week to make it easier to follow along with all details of our various systems. Specifically, I added 3 new statuses:

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LibGuides 2.0 is Live!

Hello all! This morning we pushed our LibGuides 2.0 site live. It is now available at the good ol’ familiar URL of libguides.gvsu.edu. I’m still poking around looking for issues and broken links, but if you find anything, let me know.

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NYPL: The Networked Catalog

A few weeks ago, folks at the New York Public Library posted a fascinating article on the future of the catalog and the richness of the data stored within. The article was prompted by the nature of the catalog, and a question about its future:

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LibGuides Migration: The Final Countdown

Just a reminder that we are going live with LibGuides 2.0 tomorrow morning. At a few minutes before 9am, EST, I’ll be starting the process to switch our existing LibGuides URLs to point to the new LibGuides 2.0 setup.

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LibGuides Migration and Downtime

We’re all set to go live with LibGuides 2.0 on Wednesday, 8/20. Since this involves changing around where URLs point to (DNS updates), there will be a period of time where LibGuides 1.0 and LibGuides 2.0 will be inaccessible. This could be a few minutes or a few hours. (We have to wait until all the Domain Name Servers get updated with the message so they know where to send you.)

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Library website: embiggened

Since our site merged with the campus template 3 or 4 years ago, the largest the site’s content every got was about 1000 pixels wide. The site has been responsive since mid-2011, so it scaled nicely on smaller screens, but no matter how big your screen got, the content area never made it over 1000 pixels.

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LibGuides 2.0 Migration Status

[This is the text of the email I sent to all staff today regarding the LibGuides 2.0 migration status. I’m posting it here so folks can find it without rooting through their inboxes.]

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LibGuides 2.0 Issue Tracking

Kyle and I have had 2 LibGuides 2.0 drop-in sessions so far, and a lot of good questions have come through. We have a bunch more, however. Rather than bombard everyone with email updates on new issues, I’m collating all of the reported issues (either with the system itself or how we use it) in the Library Status App. As I hear back from Springshare with updates, or as I fix things within our control, I’ll be updating things there. Every day as I hear new reports of issues, I’ll be adding them to the app.

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LibGuides Migration Complete!

Yesterday Springshare migrated our LibGuides 1.0 guides into our new LibGuides 2.0 installation. [UPDATE: Pointed URL to live 2.0 site 8/20] I’ve looked through a lot of guides this morning, and everything looks as it should. If you are a LibGuides owner, please take a moment to look through your guides and make sure everything looks like it should. I’ll be scheduling a bunch of drop-in help sessions over the next few weeks at every campus, and I encourage you to drop by and we can work together to get any anomalies straightened out.

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Flow is available through Summon

Yesterday I told you about how Flow was coming to Summon, but wasn’t yet available. Well, astute folks have noticed that the “Log in” link is now available in Summon. (I’ve updated that post to reflect the present tense rather than the future tense.)

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Summon Integration with ProQuest Flow (Formerly RefWorks)

Recently ProQuest has integrated Summon with ProQuest Flow (formerly Refworks Flow). Flow is a free version of RefWorks that researchers can set up on their own. I wanted to share this video that walks you through how Flow and Summon work together, complete with a lot of marketing-speak and buzz words like “Return on Investment!”

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LibGuides Migration Update

I’m working this week preparing our LibGuides content for migration on July 29th, and that includes combing through stale or low-traffic content, mapping database links from existing guides, and working on making a plan for content that will not migrate to the new system. If you are a LibGuides owner with content that hasn’t been updated or visited in a while, I’ve already sent you a list of content that I’m hoping you can review. By tomorrow, I will get in touch with folks who have content that will not migrate to the new system (usually because the content types are going away) to see if the content needs to be updated after the migration or whether it is no longer needed.

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Project Updates, May and June

It’s been almost two months since my last monthly project update, so a lot has happened. I know that many of the things I am working on will affect other folks in the library. As much as possible, I’ve already gotten folks who are directly affected involved in the planning and implementation of these, but it’s fair to give everyone a heads-up on things that are in the pipeline.

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Paternity Leave: Coming Soon

In less than two weeks, my wife and I will welcome our second child to the world. I’ll be on paternity leave for a bit, and want to make sure you can still have your issues addressed in my absence. Here’s what you need to know:

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Medium Designations in the Catalog are Changing Because of RDA

Debbie spotted something minor in the catalog this week that we thought warranted a quick notice. Traditionally, the MARC 245 field has a subfield $h, which is the “Medium.” This is displayed next to the title in records in the OPAC inside square brackets, like this:

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Summon in Blackboard, Ongoing Issues

IT has finished updating the Summon building block in Blackboard, and because of some of the issues encountered with the migration, existing Summon search boxes in Blackboard will need to be updated. From Colleen in IT:

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Catalog Infrastructure Changes

I’ve been busy the past few days making some major changes to the catalog. Hopefully, you didn’t notice. You might have seen a few moments here or there where the border disappeared from the public 856 view, or the font size changed in a results page, but most of the work I’ve been doing has been behind the scenes, changing the way the catalog loads the assets that make the page run.

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The System Is Down [Updated]

Yesterday two systems went down: the hours page and our production server. The hours page is not allowing us to update the current hours, and as a result, is only showing hours for two locations: Mary I and Steelcase. Institutional Marketing is aware of the problem and working on it. This has been updated

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LibGuides 2.0 Beta Redesign

In August, we’ll be switching to the newly rewritten LibGuides 2.0 from Springshare. I’ve been working for a few months with the LibGuides committee on preparing for the transition, which involves two things:

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Illiad vs. EZProxy Update

Mary updated the configuration of our EZProxy this week as we worked through the dreaded EZProxy vs. Illiad issue. While I had put a patch in place to hide the error from users, Mary and I kept researching how to keep the problem from happening in the first place. Witt M. on Twitter gave us the suggestion to use the EZProxy “NeverProxy” function for Illiad’s URL, which will tell EZProxy not to every add the proxy URL to our hosted Document Delivery server.

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Document Delivery: No Longer Dangerous

We’ve had a strange issue that has popped up lately, where patrons who are off campus get security notices that Document Delivery might be a dangerous site! (shudder!)

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What Went Wrong with the Summon 2.0 Migration

This morning Institutional Marketing and I switched over most of the Summon search boxes to make them work with the 2.0 interface. I still have to do Course Reserve, but I will wrap that up tomorrow. I spent most of Monday on the phone with support, and most of last evening and this morning updating our website once I had figured out what caused the problem. Although it isn’t definitive, I think I discovered what happened (and my suspicions have been confirmed by folks at Summon).

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Summon 2.0 Migration Status

This morning we “migrated” to Summon 2.0. There have been some hiccups. When we flipped the switch on Summon 2.0 this morning, this is what we got:

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Catalog My Account Page Updated, High Fives all Around

This morning I pushed the newly redesigned “My Account” page in the catalog live. Although I’ve tested it extensively and tried to find all of the hidden messages and functions, the OPAC has a way of showing you special screens depending on which way the wind is blowing. So if you find a screen that looks weird, take a screenshot and send me an email. I’ll do my best to make it better!

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Catalog My Account Updates Coming Soon

Over the next week a lot of this will be getting updates, including Summon and the login screens for Course Reserve and Document Delivery. One other thing that will change is in the catalog: Friday I’ll be updating the catalog’s “My Account” screen to be cleaner and more intuitive.

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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:

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OPAC Advanced Search Redesign

Today I had to use the advanced search screen in the catalog for something, and I couldn’t stand how nothing lined up with anything else. So I fixed it. Everything is basically in the same place, but it’s just a little cleaner. Let me know what you think!

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LibGuides 2.0 Switchover Updates

The library LibGuides Committee1 has been working through the details of implementing LibGuides 2.0, a redesigned and rewritten version of LibGuides. Last week we had several productive meetings to explore different aspects of this transition, and I wanted to give everyone an update on our progress and what to expect.

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Project Updates, April 2014

There are a lot of projects on my plate right now, and many of these projects will affect other folks in the library. As much as possible, I’ve already gotten folks who are directly affected involved in the planning and implementation of these, but it’s fair to give everyone a heads-up on things that are in the pipeline. Since I do an update with my team every week, I thought that once a month or so I’d post those updates here so everyone can get a sense of where I’m at with things.

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Summon 2.0 Preview Banner

To prepare folks for the upcoming change, I’ve added a banner to Summon that lets folks try out Summon 2.0. The banner has a close button that will hide the banner for 7 days if you find it annoying.

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Recent Failures (and how I fixed them)

This collection of work notes is mostly about the changes, successes, and triumphs of my work on the GVSU Libraries web presence. But not everything goes smoothly. Here are a few things I screwed up on this week, how I fixed them, and how I’m trying to prevent things like this in the future:

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Purchase Request Form Updated

We’ve updated the purchase request form on the website to be easier to fill out and to provide some simplicity on the back end. You can find the form at https://gvsu.edu/library/purchase or linked off the Services landing page.

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Summon 2.0 Feedback Roundup

Thanks to everyone who came out to the Summon 2.0 feedback sessions over the past month, and to those who send their thoughts via email. Here are some of the findings from the sessions, and a proposal for moving forward:

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Link Resolver update

Last week I rewrote the script that optimizes our link resolver (360Link Reset). The original script was a bit of a Frankenstein, and was hard to customize for other libraries. I made the code a lot faster and less reliant on the jQuery library, and added a bunch of configuration features to make it easier for other libraries to quickly install and customize the script. I also improved the handling of the citation, so that missing elements won’t create phantom punctuation marks.

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Usability Test Roundup - March 2014

This morning we held our third usability test of the year. When I was recruiting students, I tried something new. In addition to the three students who have scheduled testing slots, I recruited a backup student who just had to be in the library fir the duration of the tests, just in case someone canceled. Even if the backup was never called to test, she would still get a t-shirt. That was an easy slot to fill, and it proved a valuable change when the first student canceled. For the first time in three years, I didn’t have to run around the library frantically asking students to participate in the test.

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Show similar results in failed non-keyword search

I made another small tweak to the “No results” page in the catalog. The first option in the suggested next steps bullet list is “Show similar items.” This is an anchor link that will drop you down the page to the results list that was pushed below the blue “No results” box. Bob Schoofs suggested this, and hopefully this will help balance the need for folks to realize that their exact result wasn’t found while still giving some context for similar titles/authors nearby.

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Nearby on Shelf is now

This afternoon I updated the catalog’s “Nearby on Shelf” button to be a text link that better describes the results you get when collecting it: “Browse Similar.”

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Usability Test Roundup - February 2014

This morning we had another usability test with three students in the Mary Idema Pew Library. We used the same questions as our last test, but this time focused on Summon 2.0 and whether some of our tweaks to the catalog helped users with their difficulties. The questions were:

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Summon Peer-review Label Change

One quick change from last month’s usability test was to change the label in Summon for the scholarly/Peer-review filter. I’ve made that change, so the filter now is labeled “Peer-reviewed and other scholarly publications” instead of “Limit to scholarly publications, including peer-review.” Hopefully this will be less confusing for patrons. The code to make the change was rather simple, and is available on Github.

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Summon 2.0 Feedback Needed

We have to switch to Summon 2.0 by August, so I want to spend some time test driving the new interface and gathering feedback to see how this will change we teach and train students.

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Catalog Font Sizes: Now More Readable!

This morning I made some minor changes to the catalog keyword search results and record display pages. Since we had mashed together our University web template with the catalog template, some relative font sizes were wreaking havoc with the size of the search boxes and item listings. The bib record search box was so small I could hardly read the ranking selections below the input! So I worked through the identified issues and made things more readable by evening out the font sizes. I also converted the “Search” button to our template, making it blue rather than the browser’s default.

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Distance Learning Update

Last week, Rita brought my attention to a bit of crucial information for distance students that did not get migrated from our old distance learning site to the new one: local book dropoff locations. I’ve now added the locations for local book dropoffs for our distance students to the Student Support page under Distance Learning.

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Changes to the catalog

After our last usability test, we decided to make a few changes to the catalog to remove duplicate pages and make the site a little more intuitive. The changes were:

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Computer Availability Map Tweaks

The Computer Availability Map has been in use over a year and a half now, but we were just informed by Patty at Frey that CHS 290 only has 12 computers, not the 40+ that the map lists. When I looked into it, I realized that IT has imaged a lot of the computers at CHS as if they were in 290. As a result, we changed the labels on the Computer Availability Map for Frey from “290” and “490” to “2nd Floor” and “4th Floor.” Hopefully the less specific label will make folks a bit more forgiving of the inaccurate numbers.

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Requesting Journals from the ASRS

We’ve had an unusually high number of print journal requests from our ASRS lately. And our patrons all through they were getting a specific article, not a bound journal. Patty and her crack team of students over at Frey did some investigating to see why folks might be ending up requesting journals from the catalog when they intended to get specific articles. Right away they stumbled upon an issue with Summon.

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Usability Test Roundup - January 2014

This morning we returned to our monthly schedule of usability tests with three students in the Mary Idema Pew Library. We focused on a few “benchmark” questions aimed at general article searching (find a peer-reviewed article, find sources on a general topic) and a few questions aimed at the redesigned request function in the catalog. The questions were:

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2013 Website Annual Report

Last year was a busy one on the website. I just put together our first website annual report, and I’ll be spending a lot of time digesting the lessons from these numbers over the next year. Despite no major changes to design, content, or information architecture, our visits, unique visitors, and pageviews nearly doubled. Mobile visits nearly quadrupled, and visits to our specialized tools increased on mobile and tablets. So how to account for the dramatic increase in website use? My guess is adding seats in the library. In June we opened a brand new library, with three times as many seats as we had in the old library.

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LibStats changes

For the past few years, there has been a hidden link on the left hand side of the website that would take you to the LibStats entry screen. Last year, the librarians moved from using LibStats to LibAnalytics, and this week the front desk switched over as well. You’ll still be able to run reports on the data you’ve entered in the past, but we’re retiring LibStats as a data-entry tool.

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Catalog Updates

Today I finished converting the catalog to the new website template and adding the new request buttons. Thank you to everyone who gave feedback over the past month or so.

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Hours Page Redesign is live

This morning, our redesigned hours page went live. You’ll notice the difference on the homepage and on the hours page:

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Hours Page Redesign

A while back, my students Jon Earley and Krzysztof Lower and I did a bunch of research into how our students and faculty were using our library hours page. We had seen some interesting trends that made it clear our old page wasn’t working any more, and we weren’t the only library to do so. The University of Minnesota and Johns Hopkins, among others, had recently written about their experience redesigning their hours pages to meet the needs of many users. In our own research, we knew we needed a system that would:

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Request Button Magic

Since we got Millennium (now Sierra), there has been confusion about the request buttons, since items in the Automated Storage and Retrieval System (ASRS) had a different button than items in the stacks. While all requestable items have a “Request” button at the top of the screen, only ASRS items have a request button next to the individual items in the holdings list. For any item, a patron clicking the top button will log in with his or her GVSU login, and then place a typical hold on the item. If the item is located in the ASRS, however, the crane never moves. It has to be manually moved by staff once the holds are printed out. The only way to make the crane move is by clicking the Request button next to the individual item in the holding list.

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Make Your Own Catalog Mockup Revisited

Thanks to everyone that sent along screen shots and comments about the “Make Your Own Catalog Mockup.” There seemed to be universal support for dropping the Summon Search bar in the catalog and adding the website navigation, but the crowd was mixed on the Catalog navigation. I’ve included each screen option below with the catalog navigation both on and off.

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Make Your Own Catalog Mockup

At the last R&I meeting, I shared an idea for swapping out the header on the catalog. A lot of folks had extra ideas for things that should be changed sooner rather than later, and I promised to make some mockups. I realized, though, that it might be easier for you guys to play with the catalog pages to make your own mockups, so you can see how things will look (or roughly how they will look) with different elements in place on different screens.

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ASRS Down Alert

The ASRS is currently down, and we’re working on the problem. (This time the problem isn’t actually Sierra, which I’m having trouble believing.) While we scramble to get the server problems addressed, I added a simple alert to any page in the catalog that has an item in the ASRS:

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Sierra's Even Less Helpful Error Messages

A few weeks ago, I was patting myself on the back for making an error screen in Sierra’s OPAC better. We clarified the reason a patron might see the error screen, and made it easy to get in touch with us to fix the error. What we found, it seems, is that this page shows up a lot. While we’d only seen one report of this page from a patron in a few years, in the past two weeks, we’ve had half a dozen or more. By giving folks an easy way to get in touch with us, we’re getting more reports.

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OPAC Versus Summon

As I spend more time tinkering with the new Summon interface, I keep thinking about how our discovery service differs from our catalog. Today, while looking for something else, I came across a tool I built a few years ago on my lunch break that makes it easier to compare the two: OPAC Vs. Summon.

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Summon 2.0 Opt-in Updates

Serials Solutions just updated the opt-in dates for Summon 2.0. Instead of January, we now have until August 15th to make sure the new 2.0 interface meets our needs before switching over. Project Manager Andrew Nagy sent this update to me yesterday:

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Sierra’s Helpful Error Messages

I was reading through last week’s LibStats questions this morning when I came across one that said:

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Mary I RSS Feed

Some issues with lists in Sierra have been fixed, and we finally have an RSS feed for new books at the Mary Idema Pew Library. You can find it at https://library.catalog.gvsu.edu/feeds/newmi.xml. Thanks to Patrick for getting that set up.

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Mary I Atrium in Computer Availability Map

Finally we’ve been able to get data about the computers in the public area of the Mary I Atrium into the Computer Availability map. You’ll notice that computers on the Atrium level are now showing up in the availability screens as well (although Macs are still not counted).

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Room Reservation Soft Launch

We’re quietly releasing the new online group study room tool by adding a link to the navigation. You’ll find it under Services > Reserve a Study Room, or at https://gvsu.edu/library/groupstudy.

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The Hours Page: Finding the right problem

One of the most heavily visited pages on the library website is our hours page. A few years ago, I interviewed a bunch of students and found that many of them had a need to know the hours the library was open today. So, I worked with Institutional Marketing to get the current day’s hours for our three most visited locations up on the home page. Page views for our hours page dropped dramatically after the change.

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Data Entry Bounty

Some of you may know that I look at our feedback from a lot of different places. I have an hour blocked off on my calendar every Monday to read emails, chats, and tweets that came in to the library over the past week. I also read through all of the questions added to LibStats, and poke around on our Google Analytics and our own custom reporting tools for the dozen or so different web tools we have here at the Libraries.

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Summon 2.0 beta testing

While we were part of the alpha and private beta of Summon’s redesigned discovery tool, Summon 2.0, the final push for 2.0 happened at the same time many of us were moving into our new or renovated spaces. Not a great time for putting a new search tool through the paces!

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Laptop and iPad Availability

The IT Help Desk is now set up with laptops and iPads for check out, and the records have been updated in Sierra. That means that the laptop and iPad availability page is now accurate (it said Mary I had 0 laptops for a while).

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Student Support Page

Since we had several new services launch this fall, I needed a way to free up some space in our navigation under the “Services” heading. Based on conversations with students and some card sorts we did a few years ago, we grouped many of the smaller services that are primarily aimed at students under a “Student Support” page. We heard from a lot of students that they didn’t really know what a lot of these different services were, or whether we could help them. They wanted a single place that was clearly labeled for them (STUDENT support) where they could find a lot of stuff the library can help whtm with. We thought launching the new page at the same time everyone was checking out our new building would help get new folks who haven’t used the library in the past familiar with what we do.

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New Mary Idema Pew Library Website

Now that the new building is open, we’ve replaced the old construction-centered website for Mary Idema Pew Library with one centered on the existing building.

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Document Delivery label tweak (or: Feedback is everwhere)

I like hearing from our students and faculty about ways we can improve the library website. On Document Delivery and Course Reserve, we’ve added a feedback tab for folks to report problems and send us ideas and comments. We made a Library Status page so folks could easily report problems or see if a problem they had found had already been reported (or fixed). Feedback coming in through these channels, as well as emails I get from coworkers, are a good starting point for finding issues to work on. But these are just a fraction of the ways our students and faculty talk to us at the library. That’s why once a week (or more), I like to look through tweets and chat logs to look for little pain points that can be fixed.

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Computer Availability Map Screen Fix

Some of you may have noticed that strange things appearing on the touch screens in place of the computer availability map. I noticed this morning that the map had a link embedded in it that would allow folks to navigate off of the map page into the greater website, replacing the map with anything else from the website (sometimes with familiar faces.)

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Computer Availability Map, Room Reservation Updates

Here are a few updates on services for today:

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Chat and Course Reserve Updates

We’ve made chat easier to find on the website, incorporating it into the sidebar on each page, thoughout most of our services. It’s not in the catalog or Summon, but it’s pretty much everywhere else.

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Services Section Reorganization

Navigation changes have been completed in the /About and /Services areas of the website. All links have been redirected to the new pages (if there are new pages), so folks should still be able to get where they need to go. The biggest changes were as follows:

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Web Updates

A few updates of importance:

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