Kerry Lyford has asked me to put up a reminder about the subject guide forum sessions coming up in the next two weeks. See Kerry’s earlier posting which includes links to the booking forms.
This is an important session for anyone who edits any subject guide to come to. The LibGuides implementation group is using these sessions to seek input before making recommendations very soon about the future layout and format of the subject guides. We will be reporting back about the recent usability testing on the subject guides, and talking about guidelines for creating and editing subject guides.
This is your chance to have your say, so if you haven’t already signed up for a session, please do so ASAP.
Donna and I will be changing the layout template for Camelot wiki this afternoon (Thursday 15th). There may be some pages that don’t work too well using this template, but we can’t identify them until it is put in place. For this reason, there may be a few changes over the next few weeks as we make modifications to fix any issues.
If you have any problems using Camelot wiki with the new template, please contact Library IT ASAP. If there are any major problems we can revert to the original layout.
Note: The change has been applied, and we can immediately see some problems. However, we’d like to leave the new template there, so we can investigate further, and to get feedback from you about other problems that we may not see and/or whether you like it or not. Please let us know ASAP if it becomes unusable for you and we’ll put the old template back.
We have recently learned that e-texts were not being sent last week. If a borrower complains that they have not received an e-text when they expected one, staff can check their record for an ‘etxt’ block. Please notify Library IT if you suspect that someone hasn’t received an e-text when they should have. Library IT will also look into a method to alert us if they stop working again.
Also, there were some notes about e-texts posted to Counterculture early last year. I’ve now moved these to Camelot if anyone wants to refresh their memory about how the service works: E-text Notifications.
Another reminder about the usability testing sessions this week, starting today at 1pm. Anyone is invited to come to the Central Library L4 seminar room to observe what the students do on our subject guides.
The general sessions (testing a number of different subjects) are confirmed as follows:
Monday 21 September 1pm (anthropology)
Monday 21 September 2pm (psyc)
Tuesday 22 September 12 noon (engineering)
Tuesday 22 September 1pm (biological sciences)
Thursday 24 September 10 am (religious studies)
Thursday 24 September 11 am (commerce)
There are also 6 sessions which will be looking at the Law guide, as follows:
Thursday 24 Sept 1pm
Thursday 24 Sept 3pm
Friday 25 Sept 9am
Friday 25 Sept 10am
Friday 25 Sept 11am
Friday 25 Sept 1pm
The first 6 of the usability testing sessions (see earlier posting) are tentatively scheduled for next week during the following times, and with students in the following subject areas:
Monday 21 September 1pm (anthropology)
Monday 21 September 2pm (swok or psyc)
Tuesday 22 September 12 noon (engineering)
Tuesday 22 September 1pm (biological sciences or biochemistry)
Thursday 24 September 10 am (religious studies)
Thursday 24 September 11 am (commerce)
I’ll put another posting up on Counterculture confirming these dates, or noting any changes as I hear back from the students.
I’m still working on final times and dates for the sessions that will be focusing on the Law subject guide, which will be taking place on Thursday afternoon and Friday morning.
Please plan to come to as many sessions as you can.
You’ll probably have noticed that an increasing number of departments, colleges and schools have had their websites retemplated now, to a design that has more width, a different header and colour scheme and slightly larger font on lower level pages.
Usability testing on the subject guides is planned to take place during the week 21-25 September. Sessions with students will be run on Monday and Tuesday afternoon (21 and 22 Sept), and throughout the day on Thursday and Friday (24 and 25 Sept). Exact times, and the subject area of the each student will be confirmed nearer the time.
I’ve been looking at rebranding wiki instances with the UC web team, and Colleen has created a possible new look and feel for our Camelot wiki. Tomorrow (Friday 4 Sept) I plan to try applying this to Camelot wiki, and checking to see if everything works.
I’ve just been dismantling great sections of the old Camelot website, as the information on these should now all have been copied across and updated in the Camelot wiki. I haven’t removed the entire Camelot website yet, as there are some things that still use files on it eg the staff photos on the phone list, and some layout components of dynamic pages (like the staff phone list). We’ll be working to move these to another server over the next few weeks.
It could be that, in the process of dismantling the pages, I’ve broken some other things that relied on files on the old Camelot website. Or it could be that there is some information that has missed the conversion process. If so please contact Library IT. At this stage, nothing is irretrievable.
Counterculture can become a victim of its own success – lots of interesting postings can make it hard to scan for relevant postings or find a particular one you are looking for. Following are some hints for how to make your posting easy to scan and read without making it hard to find other postings. Things to think about are titles, spacing (white text), and using the Read More functionality.
