Thanks everyone for the beta comments, many were useful, some were not, and others we can’t – for a variety of reasons – take any action on for the moment. That being said, this site is designed for the users, so any and all user criticisms, pointers and comments are appreciated.

Things are moving smoothly towards a release for the fall semester. Our launch date is set for August 12th, about 1 week prior to the beginning of fall classes, but we hope to possibly release sooner.

Additionally, we are pushing builds of changes (based on internal schedules, task lists, and external comments) to the beta server, and the first push will be Friday, July 10th. We hope to push at least one more ‘semi-finished’ build out to the beta server for public consumption by all a week or so prior to the launch date.

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

 

 

 

 

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.

Hi Everyone – it was made clear recently that some folks are unaware of how the databases page on the new website will function; we have in fact re-written the code engine, incorporated the front-end portion into our unified API and presentation layer structure, and re-constructed the database to be more appropriate. There is also, of course, a new back end as well.

All of that being said, people can be sure that the front-end functionality has not changed, but has in fact become more useful. The three interface areas of Search, Title browse and Subject/Type browse remain, as we have always indicated. However, the Search function now performs a keyword search on all / chosen metadata fields including description, title, subject, type, etc. – this new functioning will make it much easier for users who need to locate a given resource by a keyword or term, or who can only recall a portion of a DB title, etc.

Additionally, all results are loaded into the DOM immediately and bootstrap/jquery is being used to sort through the results on the fly, so users will see immediate results as they type / use the interface, there are no page refreshes that need to occur to see results.

If you are staff/fac user currently with access to the page, you are seeing a development version, the new interface is being designed in a separate environment.

Currently, records with incomplete or incorrect language metadata show up as “undetermined” in the Language facet of Scout.

Instead of using the EBSCO default “undetermined”, we intend to describe the language of these records as “English or other.”  Most of the records with incorrect language metadata are in English, so a label that indicates as much makes sense from a usability perspective.

Unfortunately, correcting the metadata for all of these records isn’t practical.  Much of the incomplete or incorrect language metadata originates from vendors; when vendors update their records, any corrections made to these records would be overwritten.  Records from vendors that aren’t updated as frequently will be corrected, as will records representing physical pieces.

Please leave any feedback with regard to this change in the comments section.  This change is scheduled to be submitted to EBSCO on the morning of Friday, May 8^th and is expected to take 1-2 weeks to go into effect.

As an interlibrary loan user here at The University of Alabama, I can attest to how well the service works.  But while our interlibrary loan service works very quickly and with a minimum of hassle, some elements of the website design and functionality have been in need of an update.  We’ve begun the process of working with Cornelia Davis and Interlibrary Loan staff to implement those updates here in the last month.

Our first step toward improving The University of Alabama Interlibrary Loan web presence was to make the emails users received clearer.  Information from a table in ILLiad (the software we use to handle interlibrary loan requests) that stores the interlibrary loan URL and email address wasn’t actually making its way into the email new users got when they registered.  Along similar lines, the method by which users would be notified of status changes in their interlibrary loan requests wasn’t appearing in the registration email, either.  Some of the language users encountered in the registration email was also a little user-unfriendly — for instance, “Thank you for logging into illserver” was the first line of the email.  Using interlibrary loan for the first time can be an intimidating experience for anyone, and we hope that fixing these elements of the registration email will do a little bit to help convince patrons that interlibrary loan isn’t something to be intimidated by.

Our larger project is to redesign the ILLiad site to closely resemble the new library website.  Navigating through different library silos — the catalog, our discovery layer Scout, the databases page, our library guides, and ILLiad — can make the process of using the library website disorienting, and we hope that bringing the ILLiad design closer to the library website design will make both ILLiad use and library website use more user-friendly.  Even small things, like adding University of Alabama branding more prominently to the ILLiad page, will hopefully help to reassure users that they are, indeed, in the right place when they first access our ILLiad site.

We’ll make sure to share updates once the ILLiad redesign’s far along enough to be ready for feedback.