LIS Websites

Our new discovery services platform Encore is now (mostly) fully functional and is now our preferred and primary tool for access to our library collections. Encore is the default search tool available on our new academic research portal http://lis.luther.edu/research. Our new federated search product Research Pro is also now partially integrated with Encore. Once fully deployed this will allow additional searching within a number of external databases include Google, Google Books, JSTOR, Project Muse, and Academic Search Complete.

This afternoon, we’ve completed cutting over the old library website to the new one that has been growing over the past several months. The new site is available at http://lis.luther.edu/research. Many of the old URLs on the site have been redirected to the new site, though not every single one. The old site has been moved to the following location: http://library.luther.edu/old/ where it will remain visible. There are now many broken links on that old site, but if you squeeze old into the URL at the appropriate place, you should still be able to locate any old content in its previous form.

As we move to our upcoming launch of a new academic research portal for Luther, we now have a functioning “home page” that is open for beta-testing and review by LIS staff and others with an interest in such things. The page is located at http://lis.luther.edu/research and consists of the following current features:

• A top refreshing section for keyword searching of multiple sources including Encore, Magnus, find.luther.edu, Google, and WorldCat. Research Pro (our federated database tool) will also be searchable from this location after implementation. Encore is the default search tool.

Posts regarding service interruptions are no longer being hosted by helpdesk.luther.edu. Service interruption posts are now hosted by lis.luther.edu in the Service Interruptions blog. However, the Help Desk home page will continue to display current postings made through the LIS site in near real-time. Users can continue to be directed to the Help Desk website for up to date information on outages and other services interruptions.

Hopefully, we will be soon limiting email notifications of content changes at lis.luther.edu to just blog posts and not all other content. (This post is party a test of some changes that are in place to do this). We hope this makes a more pleasant user experience for email subscribers ...

As part of the work to implement academic research guides into Drupal, we’ve added an academic subject taxonomy to the LIS Blog that allows individual posts to be tagged for specific academic disciplines. The taxonomy is not required, and should not be used for content not targeted for academic areas. We would like to encourage more posts targeting academic disciplines as appropriate as this content is now being pulled out into specific pages for each discipline. It will also be available in targeted RSS feeds by discipline.

The front page of the Help Desk website is now displaying posts from the LIS Blogs at lis.luther.edu rather than duplicating noteworthy LIS news through the site's own article creation system. Currently, the Help Desk site is gathering and displaying posts with blog tags of Training, Network and Systems, Application Development, and User Services. The posts are being gathered and displayed through Google's AJAX Feed API which claims to gather new content within an hour.

Several news items covering LIS websites for the week:

• lis.luther.edu received a newly configured home page, which will remain under review and will see additional tweaks and changes. Feedback is welcome and encouraged.

• find.luther.edu, our Google Search Appliance received a software upgrade this week which will enable us to poke at some new features.

• Our new Encore server that will serve as our primary resource discovery tool has arrived on campus and will be installed next week.

For those subscribed to the authenticated RSS feeds from the LIS blog, apologies for it not working properly over the last week. In trying to get feeds to work with Feedburner, (a tool which among other things gathers statistics about feeds), the authentication piece seems to have broken. The Feedburner connection has been severed, so feeds are now served directly from lis.luther.edu, and the authenticated content is again appearing as expected. Sorry for the inconvenience.