Recent Arrivals
We’ve launched our Recent Arrivals app, which features any item that’s been added to the catalog in the past 30 days along with any item that is on a designated new book shelf in a branch library.
Users have the option to filter these results by branch location, material type, and language. Results can be sorted by title or date added to the catalog. Any search combination, which can be defined as narrowly as Italian DVDs at the Fine Arts Library, can be saved as an RSS feed.
We intend this to be a new discovery tool which aids in browsing our enormous collection. The Millennium Catalog excels at searching for known authors, titles, or keywords. This is geared toward the student or faculty member who is interested in seeing new acquisitions in a particular branch or language.
Several of the branch libraries have been keeping manual lists of new materials on their sites. The new application can be incorporated into any branch site so that it only shows new materials for a single location. An example of a branch library already taking advantage of this can be found at the recently-redesigned Fine Arts Library. We hope we can incorporate the new app into other branch pages and free up our busy staff for other duties.
Some of the morphing the project took over the its course:
- Initially it was going to be only for new books but we identified the need to represent all materials
- Choosing an application name proved difficult (New Items? New Books & More?) and Recent Arrivals was decided by a bibliographer vote
- We identified early on the importance of showing an item’s availability status in our results, rather than requiring users to click through to the catalog to see if it could be checked out. We were able to accomplish this via MAJAX an AJAX module for the Millennium catalog.
One randomly-selected recent arrival is currently being highlighted in a homepage feature each time the page loads.
Homepage Feature
Spurred by the realization that our home page lacked a clear starting point, and that patrons are confused about their various search options, the Libraries recently decided to implement a tabbed search box. We wanted it to be prominent, simple, and intuitive.
A working group was formed to determine what tabs and sub-choices we should include as well as to make recommendations on functionality and aesthetics.
After taking inventory of our searchable services and reviewing other academic libraries, we fielded an online survey to get feedback from our staff and patrons on what tabs to include, what they should be labeled, etc. View a PDF of the results or see them online. The second link includes the ability to read open comments we received.
We created a working prototype and tested it with users which lead us to make some structural and graphical changes. See the first round of testing’s script and results summary, which mainly showed us that the search box needed to be more prominent in the overall design. In the second round of testing (script & results summary), users had a 94% success rate overall and completed most tasks in a straightforward manner using our new LIBsearch box. Feel free to contact me, Jade Anderson, directly if you’d like more detail on the testing methodology or results.
We went back and forth a bit about branding it–users had varying opinions on the matter–but we did end up branding it LIBsearch in the end. The tabbed search box that we are pushing live in a few days will be monitored closely and is subject to alterations based on feedback and analysis of use.
In current times where technologies evolve at a lightening pace and we strive to provide usable and relevant web services to our patrons, we are more interested than ever in your ideas and feedback. Let us know what you think of our newly redesigned search by commenting, filling out an anonymous one-question survey, or emailing lib-searchbox at utlists dot utexas dot edu.
TIS is proud to have our work featured in a three part series from News8 Austin. The U.S. Latino & Latina World War II Oral History Project, created by UT Professor Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, has been making an impact since it went live several months ago.
Professor Rivas-Rodriguez brought her work and the website into the national headlines when Ken Burns’ documentary on PBS, “The War”, added Latino veterans to the program (after not including them in the original cut of the documentary).
The website has an extensive searchable database of transcripts and videos of interviews with these WW2 veterans. Also featured are hundreds of photographs, both then and now, of these heroic individuals.
Not only does this body of work from Professor Rivas-Rodriguez serve as an important historical and research source of information, it has also served to reunite friends and family members that have until now, not been able to make contact.
Below are PDFs of the website stories from News8 Austin.
News8 Austin Story 01
News8 Austin Story 02
News8 Austin Story 03
Posted by matthew on November 14, 2008 at 2:23 pm
We recently created a Web browser search plugin for our library catalog. The plugin is based on the OpenSearch standard.
If you are interested in creating something similar for your library, feel free to use our code as a starting point for your XML file. Then, post an autodiscovery link in the header of your catalog.
