New Website Beta!

Hi everyone,

The website beta is up, and available at : http://wwwdev.lib.ua.edu.

Keep in mind that it is a *beta* and exists as a snapshot of current work in progress. Some areas may not contain all of the information required by that area yet, others may have erroneous links (because of URL differences between live site, staging site, and active development site), and many of those URLs will not function as expected until the site goes live in early August. A good example are the website search results – since we use the Google api, and the live site is indexed and used by the api, then all website search links go to the current live site – there are a number of technical hurdles to overcome to achieve a separate, searchable index for the dev sites, and we are not even sure it is possible, so those results will – for the time being – link to the live site. But we are working to change that, and the site is about 90% complete in terms of functionality, content and links.

Please remember to ONLY make comments on wwwdev – that is the beta location – while we are continuing to work on wwwdev2 as our developmental site, wwwdev is the staging/snapshot location and is the URL that is open to all campus IP ranges. Dev2 is restricted. We may also make additional pushes to this server in the months leading up to the August launch. If so, I will communicate this clearly to everyone, with time/date, etc.

You may make comments and suggestion via KACE: https://wwwdev.lib.ua.edu/library-help/kacecontact-form/ OR you may email me directly (sjturner1@ua.edu)

Please be critical, but actionable. Comments such as “I hate XXX, and you are all impertinent fools” will be generally ignored :-).

But honestly, we welcome any and all suggestions. We will be working non-stop on the site until early August, which is the official launch period (about a week out from start of classes). Comments will be taken for the first two weeks, post-beta launch, after which we will close down the comment shop as we begin to work on actionable concerns (June 30).

Reference and Instruction folks – if there is a site section you need for us to complete or fix in order create instruction guides/tutorials, please let us know.

The beta is open to the entire campus, by IP, and access (unless you VPN in) from off-campus is disallowed. We intend this to be a ‘hard’ beta launch for the libraries, meaning we have officially announced and solicited comments from library faculty staff and students, but we want to involve the greater campus community as a larger whole at a later time, after all of the commenting is complete (post-june 30). You can feel free to tell parties you think are interested, or can contribute, but they must be made area of the beta status of this site. We may perform other pushes of changes to the wwwdev snapshot server over the ensuing months leading to August, and some of those may be better for consumption by outside-of-the-library parties.

Areas with known issues or bugs, or incomplete content, etc.:

  • Web site search results link to live site (lib.ua.edu)
  • Computer availability links to live site, and uses old look and feel (new version not yet complete)
  • Contact and parking info not yet on Hours/maps/locations page
  • Williams collection links to old site
  • Only front pages for SMC and ADHC exist at the moment
  • You will find some links not working, or going to odd places
  • 5-10 % content is not yet available, or represented on the snapshot server

 

 

 

 

Language facet update

In a previous post, we announced our intention to change the Language field label “undetermined” to “English or other” in Scout.

The proposed change has been halfway implemented. For the catalog results that used to display in Scout with the language field label “undetermined”, that field has now been updated to display as “English or other.” However, the applicable EDS results still display with the “undetermined” label.

The second half of this change will be rolled out in the coming weeks. We’ll let you know when the change is complete.