Posts Tagged ‘website’
Posted on April 12th, 2012 by Paul Stainthorp
Roddy Macleod despairs of some academic library websites, including the University of Lincoln’s.
In this particular case, he’s talking specifically about links to out of date “current awareness” resources on our Portal (he’s dead right to – that’s a problem we need to fix a.s.a.p.), but there’s something about library websites that seem to inspire a general sense of despair in a lot of people. They need to be good – they rarely are. It ought to be easy for a group of “”"information professionals”"”" to keep a small-ish set of web pages up to date and intelligible, but it’s never really been something we’ve been able to do a good job of.
Deep breath; say it with me: “our library website sucks, and it’s our fault“.
We’re trying to do something about ours: we have a project group working over the summer to bin most or all of our existing pages on the University Portal, and to create a new, much-simplified, much more user-friendly site based on WordPress, at library.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk (to be mapped over to the main library URL before launch). This working party will use Google Groups to discuss the new site and track changes. Unified discovery and access to print and e-resources will be pushed right to the front of the site.
Version 1.0 of our proposed site structure is here; comments welcome.
Some problems/questions for us:
- How do we involve the users in our design, and incorporate user changes and feedback?
- How do we test the site for intelligibility/usability?
- How do we stop the content from fossilising?
- How do we find out about problems with the site, and take those problems seriously?
- How do we keep the quality high and the writing clear, intelligible, and free of librarian’s jargon?
Tags: new, review, Roddy Macleod, structure, website
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Posted on March 28th, 2012 by Paul Stainthorp
There is a project going on at the University of Lincoln at the moment to rebuild our directory of academic staff profiles on the web, in line with our new corporate website.
As I mentioned in my presentation to library managers last week, it’s turning out to be a nice example of how new web applications can be spun up quickly at Lincoln using our existing [open and non-open] data sources (in this case, HR staff data, BuddyPress social profile data, Repository feeds, Gravatar images, and our OAuth authentication framework/Common Web Design), plus a bit of developer magic.
You can search our staff profile directory (still in development) at: http://phone.online.lincoln.ac.uk/
There is a growing tendency for universities in all groupings—certainly for the research-intensive universities—to publish the entirety of an author’s publications to their web profile as embedded content from their repository and/or Current Research Information System (CRIS). Here are a few examples of staff profiles on other UK universities’ sites which incorporate publication lists derived from their repositories or CRISes:
We’re pulling the publication details from the Lincoln Repository for each author into their web profile (example), using a search on their University of Lincoln staff ID (which forms part of their standard HR data profile) – e.g. http://lncn.eu/ep/000157. We can then get at the Repository data in almost any format we want (BibTeX, JSON, XML, RSS, etc.). I’m also keeping a close eye on the development of the EPrints Shelves plugin, which might be an interesting tool for giving authors more flexibility and control over how their Repository publication list(s) are displayed on their web profile.
Tags: BuddyPress, CRIS, CWD, data, EPrints, examples, Lincoln Repository, profile, repositories, Shelves, staff, staff ID, universities, website
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Posted on November 22nd, 2011 by Paul Stainthorp
Reported here:
“The 2011 UKeiG Jason Farradane Award has been awarded to the United Kingdom Council of Research Repositories (UKCoRR). Founded in 2007, UKCoRR is a professional membership-driven organisation managed for and by those staff working throughout the UK as Open Access repository administrators and managers.”
The Jason Farradane award is “made by UKeiG to an individual or a group of people in recognition of outstanding contribution to the information profession“. UKeiG are the UK e-Information Group, a more-than-usually-autonomous special interest group of CILIP.
In other news, we’ve finally managed to get the new UKCoRR website launched. You can see it for yourself, at:
Tags: awards, CILIP, Jason Farradane, launch, special interest group, UKCoRR, ukcorr.org, UKeiG, website
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Posted on November 17th, 2011 by Paul Stainthorp
(Yes, I’ve used this ‘hilarious‘ blog post title before. So sue me.)
I was at Lincoln Central Library on Free School Lane this morning for a meeting of LISN, the Lincolnshire Information Services Network.
LISN (pronounced listen) has been in existence since August 1998 when a group of (mainly) college and university librarians decided to network on a formalised basis. The group has evolved considerably since then to welcome any Lincolnshire-based information provider/library wishing to exchange ideas and information to benefit the Lincolnshire community.
Every LISN meeting runs to a similar pattern: after the standard apologies-minutes-matters-arising bumf, we discuss at length a topic of interest to Lincolnshire libraries of all sectors (today’s topic was on the subject of online learning materials: “what we are doing in terms of providing online interactive learning materials to support the users of our collections and resources? Are we using learning materials provided by suppliers or creating our own?“). Then each member library provides an institutional update; AOB; end.
I’m meant to look after the LISN website (www.lisn.org.uk) – I’ve not always been terribly good at giving this job enough attention (colleagues from the UKCoRR committee will find that a depressingly familiar story), which is why I’m pleased that fellow LISN rep Rachael Adair from Lincoln College has offered to share that task with me.
The other interesting topic that came up at this morning’s meeting is the progress Bishop Grosseteste University College are making with their library extension – you can see the latest construction photos on their Facebook page, at: http://www.facebook.com/bishopglibrary
Tags: Bishop Grosseteste, construction, extension, Facebook, groups, libraries, Lincoln Central Library, Lincoln.Lincoln College, Lincolnshire, LISN, meetings, photos, public libraries, Rachael Adair, Sibthorp Library, UKCoRR, website, www.lisn.org.uk
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Posted on September 7th, 2011 by Paul Stainthorp
We’re about to formally launch LNCD, the new University-wide technology for education group convened by Joss Winn from the Centre for Educational Research & Development, and including people from CERD, ICT Services, and the Library. LNCD’s website is now live, at lncd.lincoln.ac.uk (and also at lncd.org). LNCD is Not a Central Development group.
A couple of people from the Library are already involved in LNCD, but anyone with an interest in the use of technology in higher education is welcome to join using this form.
“LNCD is a progressive group that includes educational developers, technologists, teachers, researchers and students, [and library people! – PHS] and was set up to support the objectives of Student as Producer through the research and development of technology for education…
“LNCD offers incentives to people who wish to contribute to the rapid innovation of appropriate technology for education at the university, through work-experience, research bursaries and assistance with internal and external applications for funding. We also provide advice and support for the use of technology in research, teaching and learning…
“LNCD is Not a Central Development group!”
N.B. the Library’s intern Steve Pannett designed the LNCD logo.
Tags: CERD, ICT Services, Joss Winn, LNCD, Steve Pannett, website
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Posted on August 4th, 2011 by Paul Stainthorp
We’re making a few changes to the home page of our library catalogue in time for the new academic year. Changes include:
- Reduced ‘tabset’ browsing to only the most important elements of the catalogue.
- Use of the newest version of the University’s Minerva logo and colour scheme.
- Home page used for ‘top 10′ (…ish) links to Library services elsewhere on the web – these are served up using an RSS feed via Feed2JS (so that we can display the same links in other environments such as Blackboard). All placed in one of HiP’s lovely XSL stylesheets.
Very many thanks to the new LNCD intern Jamie Mahoney for help with styling this!
Here’s the current, ‘old’ front page:
And here’s the new, redesigned page – still in development!
You can have a look at it, if you like, at:
This isn’t intended as a long-term solution for the question of the Library’s web presence. There’s a lot more we need to do to consolidate and simplify the information we present to users across different environments (open web, intranet/Portal, Blackboard VLE, etc.). But it’s a good short-to-medium-term fix which makes the most of the tools we have available at the moment, and recognises the value of establishing www.library.lincoln.ac.uk as the home of our ‘primary’ presence on the web. If nowt else, that’s the address we’re printing on our induction materials 
We also had to work out a way of testing this on one of our public-access OPAC kiosks. I was particularly proud of this little MARC hack which allowed us to navigate to the test version of the home page without having to use the browser navigation bar (which is disabled on the kiosks).
Tags: hacks, HiP, induction, intern, Jamie Mahoney, kiosk, library catalogue, links, LNCD, MARC, Minerva, OPAC, RSS, subdomain, tabset, web design, website, XSL
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Posted on July 28th, 2011 by Paul Stainthorp
The University of Lincoln has… rather a lot of web subdomains. Some might say too many. Our JISC funded Linking You project touched on this problem (assuming it is a problem), and then slowly—and wisely—backed away.
All of the following can by found using a Google domain search – each of these can be suffixed by “lincoln.ac.uk” to form a real domain name:
Disclaimer: I’ve no idea how many of these are current, official, or meaningful. However, here’s a humble proposal: if you want a new subdomain under *.lincoln.ac.uk, you have to have it tattooed on your arm first.
- alumni.lincoln.ac.uk
- auth.lincoln.ac.uk
- awww02.lincoln.ac.uk
- awww05.lincoln.ac.uk
- blackboard.lincoln.ac.uk
- blogs.lincoln.ac.uk (and any number of blog sub-subdomains)
- commons.lincoln.ac.uk
- cross.lincoln.ac.uk
- cswww02.lincoln.ac.uk
- dev-www.lincoln.ac.uk
- dcapi.lincoln.ac.uk
- data.lincoln.ac.uk
- diverse.lincoln.ac.uk
- ecards.lincoln.ac.uk
- email.lincoln.ac.uk
- enterprise.lincoln.ac.uk
- eprints.lincoln.ac.uk
- filmpolicy.lincoln.ac.uk
- forensicchemistry.lincoln.ac.uk
- gateway.lincoln.ac.uk
- gophers.lincoln.ac.uk
- graphicdesign.lincoln.ac.uk
- helene.lincoln.ac.uk
- hemswell.lincoln.ac.uk
- learninglab.lincoln.ac.uk
- learninglandscapes.lincoln.ac.uk
- lisc.lincoln.ac.uk
- lncd.lincoln.ac.uk
- lost.lincoln.ac.uk
- m.lincoln.ac.uk
- mccplacement.lincoln.ac.uk
- mchome.lincoln.ac.uk
- my.lincoln.ac.uk
- neo.lincoln.ac.uk
- ojs.lincoln.ac.uk
- online.lincoln.ac.uk (and several sub-subdomains including cwd.online.lincoln.ac.uk, openatrium.online.lincoln.ac.uk, and nucleus.online.lincoln.ac.uk)
- orth.lincoln.ac.uk
- owps.lincoln.ac.uk
- pay.lincoln.ac.uk
- pebblepad.lincoln.ac.uk
- phone.lincoln.ac.uk
- portal.lincoln.ac.uk
- portfolios.lincoln.ac.uk
- posters.lincoln.ac.uk
- print.lincoln.ac.uk
- reviewdb.lincoln.ac.uk
- robots.lincoln.ac.uk
- shop.lincoln.ac.uk
- student.dc.lincoln.ac.uk
- studentasproducer.lincoln.ac.uk
- support.lincoln.ac.uk
- thesocialapp.internal.lincoln.ac.uk
- tvhistory.lincoln.ac.uk
- visit.lincoln.ac.uk
- webpages.lincoln.ac.uk
- wwh.lincoln.ac.uk
- www.lincoln.ac.uk (our main corporate website)
- www.15×15.lincoln.ac.uk
- www.frontier.lincoln.ac.uk
- www.ix3.lincoln.ac.uk
- www.lsj.lincoln.ac.uk
- www.tsvc.lincoln.ac.uk
And I’ve not even got started on our own dirt – the University Library’s own little handful of subdomains.
Firstly, what the Library hasn’t got. There’s nothing to see at:
(i.e. we’ve nothing at the ‘root’ Library subdomain. A couple of people have spotted this slight illogicality.)
Now what we have got, or have had in the recent past:
…this points at our SirsiDynix HiP 3.08 library catalogue. Really, if anything, this ought to represent the overall web presence of the Library, with HiP relegated to something like catalogue.library.lincoln.ac.uk
…the Jerome project.
- blogs.library.lincoln.ac.uk
…which is defunct and redirects to the main blogs site.
- eprints.library.lincoln.ac.uk
…a moribund, older installation of our EPrints Repository used for the 2008 RAE.
Tags: blog, DNS, EPrints, HiP, Jerome, library, library catalogue, Linking You, repository, SirsiDynix, sub-subdomain, subdomain, URLs, web addresses, website
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Posted on May 9th, 2011 by Paul Stainthorp
The University of Lincoln are advertising for a subject librarian with a web services / mashup flavour.
Excerpts from the job description:
“To provide effective support for and work closely with the Lincoln School of Computer Science and the School of Engineering”
“Take responsibility for developing and maintaining the Library’s web presence”
“Provide support for students using specialist software”
“Experience of manipulating data through web services and APIs”
“Good knowledge of HTML and XML”
See the full job description (pdf). The University has an online applications system. Closing date is 23 May 2011.
Tags: APIs, ASL, computing, engineering, HTML, job description, jobs, mashups, software, subject librarian, vacancies, web services, website, XML
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Posted on December 7th, 2010 by Paul Stainthorp
I’ve been working on a little website for the University of Lincoln’s resident statistician, John Flynn, to promote to students (and their lecturers) the services of the Lincoln Maths and Statistics Support Centre.
It’s [yet another] WordPress site on the University’s blogging / self-publishing platform, ‘themed’ with the University’s new-ish CWD (Common Web Design) template.
The support centre itself operates out of the GCW University Library (“Learning Development” suite) three days a week, and helps students with assessment worries and analysis for project work. Related: sigma – Centre for Excellence in Mathematics & Statistics Support.
The website is at: http://mathsandstats.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/
I’ve also added a widget to the Library ‘tab’ on Blackboard, which displays links to the [currently] 4 pages on the Maths and Stats website. This I created using the site’s RSS feed (it has the WordPress ‘RSS Include Pages‘ plugin activated) – fed through Feed2JS to turn it into JavaScript-within-HTML tags – then embedded within a Blackboard HTML widget. Easy peasy.
Tags: Blackboard, blog, CETL, CWD, Feed2JS, GCW University Library, HTML, John Flynn, Learning Development, mathematics, maths, plugin, RSS, sigma, statistician, statistics, stats, student support, web design, website, WordPress
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Posted on July 22nd, 2010 by Paul Stainthorp
I’ve decided to start maintaining again my personal website, mainly as a register of all the little bits of work I get involved in. This does mean it might not always make fascinating reading (unless you’re transfixed by digital library management and development…), but at least I’ll have a permanent record of things to refer back to.
My original website was a series of plain HTML documents; now instead of maintaining my own installation of WordPress I’m using the University of Lincoln’s (i.e. my employer’s) WordPress MU / BuddyPress server at blogs.lincoln.ac.uk, but mapped to my own domain. This way I can participate in the social-networking features of BuddyPress, while still maintaining my own, personal online presence outside the University.
Tags: BuddyPress, domain, domain mapping, meta, paulstainthorp.com, social networking, University of Lincoln, website, WordPress, WordPress MU
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