gjerdery's blog

Google has recently opened up a beta version of a new communication platform, called Wave, which serves as a mash-up of email, discussion forums, and real-time chat. Accounts are available by invitation only, and I have a number of invitations I’d like to offer up to members of the Luther community (students, faculty, staff). If you are interested, contact me directly, or send a note via the “Contact Us” link to the right.

For the past two and a half days I’ve been hiding away in Olin 301 with a number of other colleagues from LIS and other departments around the college, attending the EDUCAUSE 2009 conference virtually.

This marks the first time I’ve attended a multi-day/multi-session event online, and have to pass on major kudos to EDUCAUSE for giving us the opportunity to attend locally, and for pulling it off with only a very few hitches.

A reminder to all campus community members of the invitation to attend EDUCAUSE 2009 Online events, being held in Olin 301 this Wednesday – Friday. A full schedule of events appears at the bottom of this message. Feel free to attend any or all events!

EDUCAUSE has also created a social networking site exclusively for this group. Check out The Learning Commons to create your own profile; explore videos, photos, and resources uploaded by your peers; or add your own questions and content.

EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology. Each Fall, EDUCAUSE hosts a conference bringing together classroom teachers, librarians, administrators, and IT professionals to consider current challenges and share recent successes.

This year EDUCAUSE is offering a portion of the conference online, and LIS is inviting the Luther community to join us in attending

The online conference will take place from Nov. 4-6, in Olin 301 (Round Table Room). Below is a listing of sessions.

On Oct.

On Saturday, Oct. 24, Serials Solutions will be performing routine maintenance on their servers from 11:00 AM to 5:00 PM. This may result in some downtime for the Full Text E-Journals link on the Library Research page. During this time, an alternative will be to search Encore for the title you seek, looking for results with “[Electronic Resource]” in their titles.

The Encore library resource discovery tool will be upgraded Tuesday, Oct. 20. The upgrade procedure will require about 30 minutes of downtime at some point of the day. If you need to search the library collection while Encore is unavailable, please try the “Magnus” tab on the Library Research page, or visit Magnus directly at http://books.luther.edu.

Updates to the LIS website this week included:

• Update to III Millennium 2007 1.3
• Standardization of CSS themes across browsers on LIS development site.

A concern highlighted in our most recent round of usability testing was the disruption of having to search for the LIS site’s login option when trying to access protected content from a link elsewhere on the site or in an email.

Now, when users attempt to access protected content without already being logged in, they will be directly prompted for their Norse Key login. New visitors to the site who have a valid Norse Key will also be able to login at this point.

Thanks again to all of our usability testing participants for their insightful observations!

The following updates were made to the LIS website over the past week:

• Patches applied to Illiad server OS.
• Upgrades to core and supplementary Drupal modules.
• Added ability to stream local audio (see 40 years ago for an example)