Some of you may have already noticed that the Assyst Self Service Portal looks a bit different when logging a request for IT Services. This is the site you use to log an assyst job (so will affect lecturers/liaison librarians logging jobs for high demand and staff logging jobs for ITS). ITS have made some changes to the look and workflows – the main difference is as follows (from ITS):
“Once you have completed a service request form you need to add it to the cart. Once you have completed all service requests, proceed to the checkout and “Checkout” your service request items.
The cart facility may not be to everyone’s liking. However, at present this is the facility the tool offers. We are hoping to upgrade the tool in the next few months and an option to bypass the cart will be made available where only a single Service Request is necessary”
So – basically, treat your IT assyst jobs like online purchases and you should be right. Academics may not yet be aware of the change so staff involved in the high demand workflow might get a few complaints/questions.
The latest Summon 2 update brought back the RSS feed option for searches on Friday last week. Alas, the feeds do not seem to be working – on clicking on the RSS icon you will get a blank page with an error message. Error messages are variable, depending on what browser you are using but will be something like “Not Authorized”. The Summon team are aware of this issue and are working on it. I’ll update this post once I hear the issue has been fixed.
Due to some problems we have been having with some chat messages not being received by patrons using AskLIVE from the Multisearch home screen (i.e. from AskLIVE logo at top right corner of screen) – we have turned this off and the logo/link no longer appears.
Patrons can still access asklive from the library home page and also from the sidebar that appears when they click on an article link. If anyone enquires as to where the link has gone, please direct them to use the main AskLIVE page and explain it has only been temporarily removed.
The Summon developer team are working on changing the askLIVE widget code, once they’ve made the fix we’ll turn it back on again. Unfortunately I do not have an ETA on when this will be done.
We’ve had reports of Scopus not working – sometimes page loads but without the style sheets (ugly bullet points appear) and sometimes you’ll get a server/time-out error.
Scopus appear to be having server problems – this is a wide-spread problem and is affecting other libraries too. Lincoln library staff have reported the issue.
To try and fix up some recent AskLIVE problems I am updating all the widgets we have about the place.
I am now working through the widgets used by Liaison librarians in their subject guide profiles. Unfortunately we (e-services) do not have admin access to your profiles so will have to log in as each of you to make the changes. This is possible in Libguides v2 – but you will get sent an email alerting you that “Library – University of Canterbury” has logged in to your profile.
Please let me know if you don’t want me to make changes to your profile AskLIVE widget (the change is only minor so shouldn’t visibly affect any functionality – however, if I stumble across incorrect code I will be fixing it) and would rather make the changes yourself.
Otherwise, please just ignore/delete the automated emails.
It’s not often we see students waxing lyrical about our libraries – here’s a Friday before a long weekend treat for you all.
Spotted on my Facebook feed this morning…keep reading til the end people – all is not as it appears at the beginning.
What we currently use is an in-house system developed in 2003 by the talented programmer – Margaret Adam. It has served us well, however has become so complex through various additions over the years, that it is now difficult to make any big changes to it. In light of the Library’s commitment to the UC Graduate Profile, and some recent frustrations with staff development course administration, we would like to make some improvements/changes, so have decided to review the system, and either re-develop what we have or purchase Springshare’s LibCal software.
The first part of the project is to assess our needs/wants in a booking/course management system.
The project team will be compiling a requirements list and we’d love your input.
If anyone has any points they’d like to make RE what functions would be good to have, what is an absolute must, and what we definitely don’t want in a system (to cover setup and admin of courses, public interface and booking process, evaluation, and statistics/data gathering) please email me your feedback.
Liaison librarians may be interested in the latest features of the LibGuides v2 update – 2.1.6 (brought in on the 30th April):
Custom Column Width options for pages – meaning you’ll be able to customize the % width that columns take up on each page, without breaking the responsiveness of the page (for mobile devices etc.)
Customisable Language Options – this gives us the opportunity to customise the wording of standard headings/features etc. in Libguides pages. Click here for some humourous Springshare examples of what can be done.
More information about the update can be found on this Springshare blog post
Could all guide editors please check your guides for any internal links that aren’t using friendly URLs (these are links to any content in LibGuides that use the format “content.php?pid=”). These links are from the old version 1 site and are currently being redirected to the new site. The redirects will only remain in place for 6 months, so it is important that they are updated to the new page URLs (format is “c.php?g=”) by October 2015. If they haven’t been updated when Springshare remove the redirects, then the links will break.
I’ve prepared a spreadsheet containing the full list of guide pages that use these links. Please work through the list of links for your guide(s) and update them.
If you have any questions or concerns, please contact eServices.
