Author: Paul Thompson

Categories
General Interest

Live date for catalog refresh now January 3rd

The go live date for the new catalog is being reset for January 3rd, 2018. A number of factors went into the decision to delay roll out. The later date allows time for the Material Type project to be completed, some issues brought up in the feedback process to be addressed, more robust testing done with the students in the fall, and announcements to be sent to the Digest to give patrons notification of the change.

We are working through the feedback gathered from the online form and the feedback meeting held at the end of spring semester. Updates will be announced on the Staff portal and at library meetings. The new catalog will go live on January 3rd, and a link to the old catalog will be available for one week only while we check for any problems.

Please contact Melanie Mc if you have any questions or concerns. Mmcgurr1@uakron.edu or x5390.

LibGuides

UPDATE: it appears that Amazon Web Services is back up and running, which means so should LibGuides.

Due to an outage with Amazon AWS S3 servers, our LibGuides are down. Other SpringShare products such as room booking, do not seem to be effected.

I’ll continue to monitor the situation and update as events warrant.

UL Catalog

The library system and library catalog hardware experienced  a series of failures on Thursday and proved unrecoverable on site. Disks have been sent off site to our vendor for reconstruction.

We apologize for the inconvenience. Please be assured our vendor is doing their best to get us up and running as soon as they can.

Library Services affected by hardware failure

  • UA Libraries Catalog searching
  • OhioLINK requesting from the UA Libraries Catalog
  • Access to My Library Account

    Access to Electronic Resources, ILLiad,  and Lib-Guides are unaffected by this hardware failure.

To locate UA Library material in OhioLINK

 Go to:

http://olc1.ohiolink.edu/search/X

Type in your search criteria

In the Add Limits box, select The University of Akron from the Location drop down menu

This will return a list of items in the UA collection.  The call number will be listed on the record display.

Library staff can assist with your search and help you locate the material.

To Request Items from OhioLINK and SearchOhio

If you have an Akron Summit County Public Library (ASCPL) card you can use your ASCPL card to request OhioLINK and SearchOhio material.  Be sure to have the items sent to your local ASCPL branch.

LibGuides Down

UPDATE: LibGuides appears to be up-and-running. If you experience any further difficulties please let me know.

SpringShare is experiencing problems with all public-facing instances of LibGuides. They are aware of the problem and working on a fix. As soon as service is restored I’ll let you know.

All other SpringShare services, such as LibCal and LibAnswers appear to be unaffected by this interruption.

dotCMS Upgrade

The web team has been working behind the scenes for the last several months to upgrade our website’s content management system, dotCMS. These upgrades will enable us to receive better support, timely future upgrades, and enhanced features.

The upgrade is scheduled to begin on March 19th and run through Spring Break. During this time editing will be frozen. If you have information that needs to be placed or updated on our dotCMS pages, please get me those changes before March 19th. All content on LibGuides, LibCal, Staff Portal, and the catalog, will be unaffected.

Our website will continue to work throughout the upgrade, however there may be minor bugs to squish before full editing control is restored. If you notice anything during the week of Spring Break, please don’t hesitate to let me know.

If you have any questions please feel free to ask.

-Paul

Learning Studio Print Schedule

Hello Everyone!

The Learning Studio schedule that’s printed and placed outside the rooms has been updated. It will now accurately retrieve the week’s bookings for the rooms no matter when in the week you print the schedule. If you add a new booking on, say, Thursday, you can now re-print the schedule and it will be the same as having printed it on Monday, with the addition of your new booking.

The link to find the printable page is:

https://www.uakron.edu/libraries/services/print-learninstudio-schedule.dot

When you go to print, please make sure to change your paper orientation to landscape. Let me know if you experience any difficulties.

Thanks!

LibGuides v2 Going Live!

Hello Everyone,

This morning I will be coordinating with IT to take our LibGuide v2 site live! During this transition, our guides may not be accessible. If you attempt to login to v1 while we’re working on the transfer and you can’t access it, point your browser to this URL:

uakron.v1.libguides.com

Our v1 site will live here for a period of 6 months. Once the process is complete, our v2 guides will be accessible just as you used to access v1. I’ll need a little bit of time to get everything working, but if everything goes well, v2 should be ready, live, and online by the end of the day!

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Paul

Hello Everyone,

Per Michael:

Please log out of Windows on any workstations before you leave for the day.  We will be doing the final server shutdown and transition early, tomorrow.  By logging out, you will close any network files you might still have open and not realize it.

As always, do put in a ticket if you have any issues with your network files or broken shortcuts after then.

Thanks,

Paul

UL Staff Portal Link

Everyone,

Since we moved to the new responsive design, we lost one of the ways to access this portal. I’ve been able to re-establish this link. You can now navigate to the UL Staff Portal in two ways:

A) Scroll to the footer of any UL webpage, click Staff Portal under the About list of links.

B) Go to the Library’s home page, then click on About. At the end of the navigation to the left, you’ll see a link labeled UL Staff Portal. Clicking will bring you to this page.

If you have any problems accessing the portal, please let me know!

-Paul

New look for UL webpages

Happy Memorial Day weekend!

I wanted to let you know about some changes coming to the UL website. Beginning Tuesday, May 26th I will begin to transition our webpages to the new responsive templates. This will catch us up with the rest of the university’s pages.

What this means for you: no functionality will change, only the look. However, converting all of our pages to these templates will take a little bit of time. You may run into a scenario where you are looking for one of our webpages and it appears to be unavailable. Don’t panic. Chances are you’re viewing a page that I’m currently working on. Give it a minute, and refresh your browser. If something still isn’t right please give me a call. I expect issues like this to be few and far between.

All of our content and online services will remain in place. I don’t have a specific end-date for this project, but I will let you know when it is complete.

If you have any questions feel free to contact me.

-Paul