Blogs

Headline of the Week: Report from Associated Colleges of the Midwest Library/IT Meeting

This past Monday I was on the road again to Chicago for a meeting of library and IT leaders from the 14 colleges of the Associated Colleges of the Midwest (Beloit, Carleton, Coe, Colorado, Cornell, Grinnell, Knox, Lake Forest, Lawrence, Luther, Macalester, Monmouth, Ripon, St. Olaf). Luther joined the ACM this past summer.

We will be contacting existing Citrix users who have logged in within the past 6 months to convert them to the New Citrix Server.

We are going to use our KACE K-Box to uninstall the existing Citrix Program Neighborhood and install the New Citrix Client on your workstation.
We will individually train how to use the new Citrix and its applications.

After the existing Citrix users have been converted, all Safari users will be given access to the New Citrix Server.

We will have training sessions for all Safari users before implementation.

For a sneak preview – Citrix Training

Latest News

Over the past weekend (Nov 14-15) the LIS website was upgraded, and now uses Drupal 6 to serve content. As was noted last week, most of the site’s appearance and functionality remain the same, however a few changes should be highlighted:

• Blog notifications – the system used to send out email updates from the LIS Blog has been modestly changed. Existing subscriptions have been migrated to the new system with the most comparable settings applied for each user.

Beginning Fall 2009, Luther faculty, staff, and students can obtain the latest full version Adobe software at 80% off commercial retail pricing. Visit Adobe Student Licensing to view the prices and purchase software. At the time of purchase, you will be asked to verify you are a currently enrolled student or an active faculty/staff employee.

Norse Mail is currently experiencing sporadic issues including not displaying or sending messages, or being able to use the Chat feature.

LIS is working to resolve the issue as soon as possible.

Jay, Vern, and Jason stopped over to the library this morning to discuss plans for the renovation of the southeast area of the library. Below are a few notes from the conversation.

I’m planning to upgrade the firmware on our NetEqualizer tomorrow morning (11-18-09) around 6AM. This will result in 2 very brief interruptions of internet service of a few minutes or less.

Update No sooner than I found out that Google was aware of this issue and made this post, the issue appears to be resolved.

Google is experiencing trouble with what they call custom URL’s, and say they are activly working to fix the problem. To us this means that the URL’s ending in luther.edu that we use to access these services aren’t working right now.

Present: Matt H, Bob E, Rebecca, Bob P, Larry, Matt H, Diane

• Atomic Learning – We will be upgrading to a newer version in the near future and all links to content will need to be changed. For more on the service which delivers a library of short, easy-to-view-and-understand tutorial movies, 24×7, on over 100 software titles, see http://lis.luther.edu/learn.
• Presenter – Adobe Acrobat Pro Extended, which includes Presenter, has been ordered and received. Presenter, per Adobe’s website, is “software to liven up your Microsoft PowerPoint slides.

Luther students can now create their own playlists in the Naxos Music Library. Interested students can go to the Naxos site and follow the links under the Latest News section, or they can consult the pdf Playlist User Guide and follow the instructions there.