LIS Websites

Theft and loss of laptops is currently estimated to be more than 85,000 per year and rising dramatically ¹. The incidence level is highest among research and education than in other industries ². The recent report of Warren Country Community College exemplifies the problem of having confidential student data leaving campus on laptops — over 5,000 current and former students were in danger of experiencing identity theft with the college endangered by endless litigation.

I get asked a lot about how to use katie to schedule office hours for students. Google has rather recently released “Appointment Slots” which makes this and many other rigorous, repetitive “scheduling” tasks quite easy. Here’s the couple-minute video I placed out on the katie front page to show how to use Google Calendar “Appointment Slots”.

Magnus, the catalog for the Luther library collection, is now available in mobile format. Browse to http://books.luther.edu from your smartphone or IOS device, and you will see a simplified interface more suitable to smaller screen sizes. Going to the same URL from a computer or tablet device will enable you to use the full version of the site.

At the start of break katie will be taken offline in order to perform necessary maintenance.

Quite a bit of problems being reported trying to open PDF files from anywhere (including katie) using the latest version of Firefox. To-date, most of these problems have been limited to Windows 7 computers. If you encounter such a problem, we recommend you use Chrome browser as an alternative. Safari may also suffice in some cases. Do not use Internet Explorer with katie. Click here to download Chrome browser

In the upcoming weeks, LIS will be adding a link to the new web-based Work Order Self Service system (https://helpdesk.luther.edu) on the desktops of all Windows based faculty/staff workstations. This process is done remotely and runs in the background. More information about LIS Self Service is available at
http://lis.luther.edu/learn/kboxselfservice. Note that you can still contact the LIS Technology Help Desk via e-mail , phone 387-1000, or by visiting the library.

One of the complaints I hear frequently about using Google Docs on a college campus is its lack of “grammar checker”. Came across this valuable (FREE) resource in researching the issue and find that, not only does it do an excellent job (much more exhaustive than MSWord) it also doubles as a check against plagiarism. Give it a try.

Access to both Encore and Magnus is restored. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Gotta check it out

Shep McAllister is a rising senior at Trinity University in San Antonio, TX, and editor of the popular student blog HackCollege. For the past several years, he has done his college coursework exclusively on Google Docs, and today he shares his five favorite uses for the platform in the classroom.

When I started out at Trinity University, I didn’t know much about Google Docs and relied heavily on desktop word processors. As I became increasingly frustrated with these programs crashing mid-sentence, I thought I’d give Google Docs a try.