gjerdery's blog

For a few years now we’ve applied the old sayings “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and “Don’t judge a book by its cover” to the public interface to our ILLiad interlibrary loan system. The site worked great – even though it might have reminded you of the Web circa 1999.

This summer Kathy Buzza and I have worked to modify and implement the fresh, new interface made available for ILLiad by OCLC.

This week, Adam and I were able to collaborate on a EZProxy reconfiguration project that should simplify administration down the road, and reduce headaches for off-campus users trying to access our databases from “locked-down” environments.

On-campus users will notice very little change from this reconfiguration.

Library users from time to time may have run across NetLibrary ebook records in Encore or Magnus, which linked to a web-based ebook viewer.

Recently, EBSCO has acquired the NetLibrary collection and reintroduced it using the layout and interface common to other EBSCO databases, such as Academic Search Complete, ERIC, and PsycInfo.

Additionally, it is now possible to download a majority of the titles in the EBSCO collection to an Adobe Digital Editions-compatible reader (including Nooks, and iPads).

If you like trivia puzzles, try out A Google a Day, a daily challenge which will put your web searching abilities to the test.

Each day, a new question is offered, along with a place to check your answer. If you just can’t find the right answer, the site will reveal it, along with some search strategies that would take you in the right direction.

Encore, LIS’s library material discovery tool, recently was updated to version 4.0. This update provides a subtle change to the appearance of the Encore results screen, and also provides a few new search options. In the past, Encore only performed keyword searches on the text found in title, description, subject and author fields.

III will be updating our installation of the Encore discovery service on July 6. While this upgrade will not cause any downtime for the underlying Millennium server, the Encore search interface may be unavailable for 10-15 minutes during the upgrade. If you have trouble accessing Encore on July 6, use our “classic” search interface, found at http://books.luther.edu.

The interface for Magnus (the library’s catalog found at http://books.luther.edu) was updated on Monday, May 30. While this update does not add any major functional changes, it presents a cleaner look and feel for end users, and updates the HTML code behind the scenes to be more compliant with modern web browsers.

Improvements include:

• Standardization of the main search interface to match that found on the Magnus tab of the LIS library research page.
• Elimination of the tabbed display when viewing individual items.

The Encore library search engine is available once again, after an outage caused by yesterday’s power issues in the server room.

At the beginning of May, the Chronicle’s ProfHacker column compared two popular citation database platforms: Zotero and EndNote. Both platforms are currently available at Luther, and a few of us in LIS have debated the strengths and weaknesses of the two over the years.

Ryan Gjerde was recently named to serve a three-year term as editor of the ACRL Information Literacy web site, beginning July 2011.

As editor, Gjerde will work with the Information Literacy Web Site Committee, as well as other component committees of the ACRL Information Literacy Coordinating Committee, on developing and maintaining the website as an international information literacy resource, monitoring and responding to trends in information literacy, recommending enhancements to the web site, and collecting relevant data for assessment.