Another amazing bgsu blog

Three vendors of discovery layers are giving demos of their products the week of July 12th:

UPDATE: The Tuesday the 13th Summon demo has MOVED to Monday the 19th (in the afternoon) and the Encore Synergy demo has MOVED to Friday the 16th at 9 am

DONE Thursday the 15th at 9:30 am: OCLC’s WorldCat Local (Room 210B)

DONE Friday the 16th at 9 am: Innovative’s Encore Synergy (Pallister Conference Room)

Monday the 19th, 2 pm: Serials Solutions Summon (Pallister Conference Room)

Thursday the 22nd, 9:30 am: Ebsco Discovery Service (Pallister Conference Room)

The Public Interfaces Committee is working on an August 1st launch date for the new library home page. Here’s what it looks like so far.

Home Page Redesign Screen shot

Kudos to Tara Wren and Joelle Thomas for getting the format bubbles to work and WAMming the Google Scholar search.

Bohyun Kim, moderator of the ALA panel I was on this last weekend, did a nice write up of the panel at her blog Library Hat. That front row contains most of the panelists — we were a large group! Slides are here, twitter archive here (all the tweets about virtualization are from another session, not sure why the hashtag was the same).

The Shared Infrastructure (OARnet) and DSpace 1.6 testing going on now for all cloud and internal DRC instances! Depending on testing results, OhioLINK/OARnet plans to have all live instances migrated by the fall. This is a long leap forward from where the DRMC thought we would be in January…..

Testing Rudy’s brilliant idea — collecting stories for Centennial Memories via Google Voice. We were having problems with ambient noise at an event where we were trying to collect audio from BGSU retirees — and Rudy mentioned that phones are really good at cancelling ambient noise, and then suggested that we could use Google voice to capture the stories as voicemail, download the mp3s, and then upload them to Centennial Memories. Another awesome thing is that we can use Google Voice to let people text their stories in — one line at a time. Try it out!

UPDATE 2010: While the UL public services staff never picked this up, staff members (including me) were using it — until a Safari update totally broke it — or rather, vice versa. DO NOT INSTALL if you are using Safari — it’ll crash the browser constantly and it’s a pain to uninstall.

We’re testing both staff and public University Libraries toolbars, using the Conduit platform. Dave Kim from Conduit actually gave us a call about it, to see how we were using it and what we thought — very nice customer service, especially since we’re a non-profit. You can download and start using it now — let us know. We’ll probably make it available this semester as soon as staff have a chance to test it out and give suggestions. Warning — buggiest in Mac Firefox, but I’ve still been very happy with it over the last months.

University Libraries toolbar

Access Services Toolbar (this is a test staff toolbar, designed from the  Access Services homepage — I’m working on a more generic staff one)

Create your own at Conduit.

The new BG News Index went live on ul2 this summer. Thanks Woon!