OPAC refresh

I volunteered for a consortia sub-committee on “refreshing” the OPAC. Here is our charge:

The general scope of the project entails determining a new look and feel, color, and possibly some new navigation.

So, we are not going to be looking at designing a totally new OPAC through a vendor or open source, or how we can add more web 2.0 features. That will be coming later and I will also be a part of that project as well. This project will be about “putting lipstick on a pig”, as one of my colleagues stated: simply changing the look of some of the general search pages: homepage, advanced search, and maybe the bib record. We have quite an interesting bunch with a few reference people, serving graduate and undergraduate populations, a reserves person and our CLIC liaison, Deb, who will be doing these design changes for us. I am surprised that we did not get a few more people, representing the circulation and tech services folk. Mind you, I think this could be a good thing as we start to make more of a front end catalog. An interesting note is how some of the institutions use the catalog or how their students “enter” the catalog. Some have federated searching or a catalog search box on their homepages, where the student bypasses the catalog homepage and goes directly in to a bib record or a results list. At Hamline, we have the students go to the homepage first. This can obviously affect people’s perceptions of what should go where on the screen.  Also, what people would like to discard, such as the subject search as a visible search option. I will be fighting against that one.

After our first meeting a few things became apparent in terms on likes and dislikes. Our catalog, CLICnet, needs softer colors, less horizontal lines, less redundancies, less clutter. In a sense, more stripped down and simple. We all pretty much liked what Cal Poly is doing with their catalog, which was just unveiled recently. Now, while they are just serving Cal Poly and we are serving a consortium, they do have several design features that are rather nice: color, less clutter and a second box for “See Also”, which we see as a place to relegate some of that clutter on our catalog page. I see this box being filled with links for ILL, other search features, other library catalogs, etc…

Now, this process is going to go pretty quick, that is, for consortia committees. We had our first meeting last week, a second meeting this week and then maybe one after that…and then our recommendations go to the full CLIC OPAC committee. One thing I do recognize with something like this is that it is hard to please everybody on the staff with new changes and when you multiply that by eight institutions (14 libraries) it gets even more daunting. And as I said before, that this is really the “start” of CLIC realizing that bigger changes are going to be coming soon for the catalog, it will be interesting to see what people want to “hold on to” and what they are willing to part with.

Out of Time

I love the first week of school. Yep, certainly the best time of the year. All is fresh and new with the world and I can dream of new opportunities and slam the door on the previous year.

For those of you without the special “blog glasses” you might not have noticed the sarcasm dripping from my lips. Actually, if you work in an academic library you will probably have seen it a mile away. That wonderful first few weeks in September, where you are trying to plan out the semester, maybe even the full school year with committee meetings, getting to the gym, weekly staff meetings, new reference shifts, projects, etc… At the moment I have 4 things I need to schedule with committees and I can’t because I have to wait for those first meetings to see what each group is going to schedule. As you can imagine, I am using a pencil with a big eraser (sometimes electronic eraser. ) at the moment in my organizers.

Start teaching tomorrow. I usually do not schedule a class this early in the semester as I like to get them at least 4-5 weeks into the semester, when the students understand their class expectations a bit better and they are starting to actually work on something. However, the professor, one who I work with a lot, had some time constraints and we needed to do this class a little earlier than usual. (Librarian Mantra #73: Sometimes you have to go with what they give you)

Another summer…dead

First day of school today at Hamline and of course..I am not ready. Of course, whoever is? Anyway, a few things at the library. We have added an RSS feed for library news. This is one of the features I got going, but I would like to give credit to the rest of the Reference staff on this. Some of the reference folks thought it could be great, however, we need to not only update our news stories a bit more often, but be a bit more thoughtful in writing these updates. We have also added toolbars, from Conduit, for the students. Some of us have already had the toolbars for a while on some of our subject specific research guides, but we now include a general one for the library. It will be interesting to see how many times these get downloaded. The library has also added a federated search, Serials Solutions 360 Search to be exact. For my Grad Ed students I will NOT be spending a whole lot of time on this one, though I will point it out to them. Just call me skeptical at the moment. . Anyway, here is some other new things we have done at the library.

As for personal projects, I did get to work on the latest Captivate screencasting software, which I have already discussed here. The copy I had was for the beta testing, but that expired with the end of the testing. I will be getting the upgrade for my own computer very shortly. That is probably part of the reason I did not do a lot of new tutorials or updates on old ones. Of course, I am still waiting to see if the CSA/ProQuest merger will reek havoc on my old tutorials as they upgrade their interface. Speaking of upgrades, the catalog will be getting a “new coat of paint” as well. I will be working on our consortium OPAC refresher committee. I know we want to have recommendations done by October 1st and changes made for the start of the Spring semester. Sidenote on this, I think most of the libraries in the consortium are really warming up to a possible open-source product. Of course, we still have a year or so on our contract and beginning the huge process of looking at other products. On a sidenote to my sidenote, I am using our vendors product to generate statistics/reports to aid me in collection development for my department. Let me tell you it is a horrible and time consuming process. So….remember when you are looking at a product, check how they do statistics. When you come under scrutiny for funds they can come in very handy. They can also assist you in targeting weak areas of the collection. I am also gearing up for teaching: making new handouts, updating old ones, checking the database, getting the “spiel” down, etc…. Already have 9 classes scheduled for the Fall semester and I am sure I can add a few more on top of that. I will also be working on a grant for blogging, which I think I have discussed here as well. Seriously, we want to hear from anybody who wants to get in on the discussion of blogging in higher ed.

I am sure there are a few things I am leaving out, but that is for another day. Cheers