With the arrival of Heather Jenks (the new AUL) in mid October, the Attic will revert to a staff office

The Attic will be left available to be booked by Library staff members up until Friday 26 September, this being the last day of the current round of GSRR discussions.

Philip Jane

I am delighted to announce that Joan Simpson has been appointed to the position of Central Library Manager. Joan will take up her appointment on Tuesday 18th November.

Joan joins us from Christchurch City Libraries where she was their Team Leader for the Upper Riccarton and School Library, the Akaroa School and Community Library, and the Halswell and Little River Community Libraries.

Previous to this, Joan has had a varied career as a secondary school teacher, an academic at CPIT, has worked for TVNZ and in the Computing Resource Centre at Christchurch City Libraries. Joan brings good experience in a teaching capacity as well as experience as a professional librarian to this position.

Carole Rickman on behalf of Gail Pattie

LLT has announced a project to plan the relocation of the library’s DVD collection, music CD collection and microform collection out of the staffed area on level 2.

The project proposal is on the K drive: K:\projects\Central_AV_38\AV_project_proposal
Anyone who may wish to comment on the proposal is invited to do so.
THe LLT sponsor is Anne Scott and the project manager is Tim O’Sullivan.

Timothy O’Sullivan

I’m proposing to change how I manage news about the Library (things we want to tell our users) that goes on our web pages.

Currently any news is created on the Library’s home page, on the Library’s news page and on the news RSS, using Dreamweaver. This has a number of disadvantages, including the following: the number of people who can add news is very limited, it’s very time consuming, important news can’t be put up in the weekend, we don’t have an archive of old news etc etc.

I’ve been working on a method of managing Library news on a blog. This will overcome the problems listed above, and also allow our users to give us feedback on any news item via the use of comments on the blog. It will also allow us to categorise news items and then pick out news items in different categories to be displayed automatically on specific pages. For example, we can have a category “Homepage” for items that we want to appear automatically on our home page.

I’ve got a working model of how this would work, and I’m interested in any comments, criticisms, suggestions about it.

Please look at the proposed version of the home page – identical to the existing one except in the way that news is added.

Each item under the News heading on this new page has been created automatically from the news blog. It will only ever display the 3 most recent items in the Homepage category on this page. However the More news link will take you to all the news items ever added to the blog, so it will be a running record of all news items. People will be able to add comments by clicking on the news item heading, (or the comments link) to see the full item and the comments box.

Any person with a UC login and password will be able to login and add a comment that will appear immediately. Anyone else can write a comment, but it will go through a moderation process first. Library IT will be notified of any comments so we can check them immediately and remove any that might be offensive.

There will be a wider number of people in the Library who can add items, including after-hours supervisors who will be able to add any urgent news item eg if the Library has to close, or if key resources are down. Full training will be provided to the relevant people. Anyone else will be able to email Library IT to get a news item added.

I’m really interested in your comments about this new system – whether you think it is usable, how it might be improved etc etc

Catherine Jane

Just a reminder to please add your name at the bottom of any postings you make on Counterculture.

Now that we are using UC logins on the blogs, there is no longer a name associated with each posting, and UC logins are not always easy to interpret. Some people are doing this really well, but others are still forgettting.

If you’ve added a posting recently without adding your name, it would be great if you could edit it to add it retrospectively.

Catherine

I’ve just added a new feature to Counterculture that displays the last 5 items with the most recent comments in the right navigation bar, directly under the display of recent entries. The items are displayed in the order of the most recent comment.

This can be added to other blogs too – let me know if you want it added to yours.

Catherine

If you login to the blogs using your UC username and password, the system will automatically add you to the Counterculture team meaning that you will be able to add postings and comments without doing anything else.

However, if you have been part of the team on any other blog, you will need to be reinstated on that team to be able to create postings. Once you have logged in using your UC username and password the first time, contact Library IT, or the administrator of the blog and get them to add you to the team using your usercode login.

If you’ve got any questions, get back to Library IT. And please remember to sign your name at the bottom of any postings from now on.

Catherine Jane

We now have got the login procedure on blogs working with LDAP, so next time you try to login to Counterculture or any other blog, you MUST use your usual UC login and password. Your existing login and password will NOT work.

It is also set up so that any member of Library staff is added automatically to the Counterculture team, meaning that any member of staff can add postings to Counterculture. Because your login is now your UC login it is harder to see who has added a posting, so please sign your name at the bottom of any postings from now on.

One consequence of this is that administrator rights have to be reset, so over the next day or so, I will be resetting all of these. If you have an urgent need to get into your blog in the meantime, contact Library IT and we will do this urgently for you.

The blogs software has also been updated. All seems to be working as it should – the only difference that I can see is that non-members can no longer create themselves a login.

Please let Library IT know ASAP if you have any problems with anything to do with the blogs.

Catherine Jane

I’ve just received a reply to my enquiry asking about whether there has been any progress on our “white screen” long wait issue. We’d created Camtasia videos showing what happens and sent them to Serials Solutions. The reply I had is as follows:

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Hi Catherine! Thanks for contacting us.

I’ve escalated this issue to our senior developers to take a look. It is normal to briefly see the screen go white after the search is issued, but this should only last a second, and in my testing I’ve seen the normal behavior of that white screen just flashing momentarily. I’ve been unable to reproduce the extended time period that the white screen displays that is illustrated in your Camtasia videos. (By the way, those are very helpful, so thank you for sending them.) So, I’ve asked our senior developers to help determine what may be causing that extended white screen from your local environment. I apologize for the inconvenience this is causing you, and I’ll let you know as soon as I have additional information.

Thanks!

Sincerely,

Lola Estelle, MLIS
Implementation Specialist, 360 Search

If you are creating a web page which lists resources for a particular topic, and particularly if that list includes a lot of resources that are already on the Library catalogue, could you please consult with me first about the best way to create such a page.

If you look at the Web Changes SOP you’ll see that in a number of places it talks about changing from static web pages to dynamically created database driven pages wherever possible. I realise that biblioplus.php does have some limitations and at times you want to combine lists of resources with your own comments and other “static” text, but there are ways around this. If you talk to me about what you are trying to achieve, we can work together to work out the best way to create each page to achieve its purpose. I can show you some examples of similar pages which are working dynamically.

I’d also be interested in working with you to change existing pages when you are updating them.

Catherine Jane