Classes started on Monday; there’s no question in my mind that the summer has come to an end. The chilly evenings here in Michigan certainly have contributed the feeling that autumn is here! Anyway, I thought this would be a good time for me to revisit my previous entry about my summer projects, and reflect on what kind of progress I made.
I’m happy to say that I got all of my government documents projects completed, for one. I’m still not quite extricated from the old job; we haven’t hired my replacement yet (though the search committee has been doing their thing), so I’ll be doing some of the government documents instruction this fall.
My technical projects went somewhat, but not totally awry…
- The database list project was completed, and we even did some user testing. Here is what the database list looks like now. (My inner critic notes that the “Whats this” still needs an apostrophe; the breadcrumb should say “You are viewing Popular databases.” rather than “You are viewing Start Points databases.”; the Search Multiple Databases page still needs to be switched over to the new Summon search box. Is any web site ever really complete?)
- One of the things I’d hoped to do is redesign the LibGuides home page. That didn’t happen. I have been working on it for months, and have exchanged numerous e-mails with Springshare’s wonderful tech support – but the simple fact is that I don’t know javascript. I actually did have a working prototype for awhile – before I realized that it didn’t work in Internet Explorer.
- We have switched to Google Talk for our chat services. We’re using a Chatback widget. We’ve already encountered a slight problem – there’s no “alert” when a new message pops up because in Google Talk, the new chat windows are embedded right into the browser page. (There is a sound, but we don’t have sound enabled on the reference computers.) My coworkers are looking at using Pidgin or Meebo on the staff side to see if we can make one of those work.
- The Intranet issue got tabled for the time being. I’m still waiting for IT to make GMail available to faculty & staff, so that we can investigate various Google apps to see if they will suit our purposes. The students are now all using GMail (with a GVSU address, yes) so hopefully it will be soon for us, too.
- Documentation on how to share content boxes from LibGuides – done, as you can read about here.
- Content for Facebook? It hasn’t happened yet. If I can remember, I’ll feed in our Twitter account and our blog there tomorrow…
- Learning Camtasia…also hasn’t happened.
And now for the unexpected projects that came up this summer…
- Summon! I just found out today that we are, apparently, the first Summon customer world-wide to have Summon live in production mode. Dartmouth College and the University of Liverpool have Summon on their websites, but they’ve clearly marked Summon as being in beta (and if you’ll forgive me some brief snark, it’s not clear what Summon does, not from looking at their home pages. Once you get a few clicks in, they explain, but what motivation does the user have to click on the Summon link in the first place?). We have decided to just put it out there; it’s on the library home page (and yes, I tried to explain what it is). I’ve also created LibGuides content boxes that librarians can use and copy. One of the university’s educational technology people has been talking up Summon for us, too, which leads me to another project…
- I created a Blackboard site on how to integrate library resources into Blackboard. It went over really well with educational technology, and we’re going to start doing workshops with them. One of the things I did was include information on how to include Summon search boxes in their Blackboard sites. (I also included code snippets for the catalog search box, for our chat widget, etc.)
- As mentioned in previous entries, we tweaked our article linker results page. Again, I’m still not delighted, but hopefully it’s a little bit more friendly-looking now. Our students said that they don’t much look beyond the fact of whether we have it online or not, so that actually makes me feel a bit better.
- I moved our blog to WordPress MU and revised and refined the categories, which pleased my little librarian brain.
So, what did you do this summer? Did you get everything done? If not, did you at least take a great vacation? (I didn’t. I am taking a vacation next week, though!)