Tag Archives: CMS

More details on ‘Ask a Librarian’ service

By Tom Reinsfelder, for the Online Reference Team

The new online reference system known as Ask A Librarian will be online beginning August 20. We need to thank everyone on CMS web development team for their hard work in helping to get everything ready before the start of the fall semester.

A few important items to note:

1. Although the system will be online and operational this week it will not be fully staffed until Monday August 26.
Beginning next week we will follow this Online Reference Schedule offering nearly 24 hour live chat coverage on week days.

2. The Ask A Librarian tab will appear on the right side of every page in the CMS and LionSearch. In the future this will be added to other locations including the CAT, Get It! pages, and ILLiad.

3. In addition to live chat, users may choose to submit questions by email using the form at http://ask.libraries.psu.edu or sending a message directly to askalibrarian@psu.edu

4. At times when live chat is not being monitored users will be directed to http://ask.libraries.psu.edu where they will be able to search for their answer or submit a question by email.

5. Further information about the Online Reference Team is posted on our Intranet Page.

Any questions or feedback about this service may be directed to UL-REFERENCE-TEAM@lists.psu.edu

Web updates: Ask a Librarian and more

By Binky Lush, manager, Discovery, Access and Web Services

On Tuesday, August 20, the CMS Development Team and the Online Reference Team will be making the following changes to the web site:

Ask A Librarian
The new online reference service will be called “Ask a Librarian.”

  1. Chat widget
    The widget will appear on every page within the CMS as a tab or button on the right hand side of the page that will say “Ask a Librarian”. When the Ask a Librarian tab or button on any page is clicked, it will bring up a pop up chat box. If no one is online to chat, the box will have a message that suggests the patron send their question via email or can try to chat later. CMS authors will be able to modify chat widgets to make them department/library specific. All chat widgets will look the same to patrons but they can be modified to tell the librarian which page the incoming question originated from.
  2. Navigation
    Usability studies have shown that there is user confusion between the terms Ask and Help. In order to alleviate that confusion with the new service being named “Ask a Librarian”, we will be renaming Help to Ask. In the global navigation at the top of every page, the last link will now be called Ask, rather than Help. On the home page, the last column at the bottom will be renamed “Ask a Librarian” – the links below this will change to reflect this heading change.
  3. Help Page
    The current help page (http://www.libraries.psu.edu/psul/help.html) will now be called Ask, and will contain an embedded chat widget, and other ways for our patrons to contact us, as well as a link to the FAQs. This page can also be accessed through http://ask.libraries.psu.edu.
  4. Footer
    Because we will no longer be using the old ask service for reference questions, we will remove the “Research Help” link from the footer of every page.
  5. Library Help
    When the service goes live, we will remove all Library H3lp chat widgets from the system.

Web Site Refresh
The Libraries site is getting an updated look! With some slight color changes and some changes to our fonts and styles, we are “refreshing” the Libraries web site to make it a bit more contemporary, without making any content changes at all. This is part of the effort of the Libraries Web Stakeholders Group and the CMS Development Team to make ongoing and continual enhancements to the site, while ensuring our users are not confronted with any drastic or confusing changes.

Research Guides Search
The Research Guides Search will appear on the Research Guides page and will allow our users to more effectively search for Research Guides. Results will display in a sortable table, making the guides and the subject specialists much more discoverable.

We are excited to bringing you these new web site updates and we welcome your questions and comments!

The CMS Development Team and the Online Reference Team

New features in CMS Version 5.6

By Ryan Johnson, technology training coordinator

The CMS Development Team will be releasing a new version of the CMS, CQ5.6, in May. Over the next few weeks, I will review some of the new changes.

This week I will highlight the new Search Features available in the Website and Digital Assets console. Continue reading →

CMS upgrade

By Binky Lush

We are pleased to announce that the CMS Development Team will be upgrading the CMS to the newest version, CQ5.6, after the spring semester. The latest release of the CMS Software will provide the following benefits for our users and for our authors: Continue reading →

Going mobile

By Binky Lush
Libraries’ Mobile Site Usage
The number of mobile visits to the full Penn State University Libraries site is growing steadily. In FY2010/2011 we had 27,000 mobile visitors. In FY 2011/2012 that number increased to 72,000 on 145 different devices ranging from iPhones and Androids to Kindles and Galaxy Tablets. A little over halfway through FY2012/2013, our mobile visits are already up to 148,000!

Continue reading →

Research Guides to Be Harvested in LionSearch

By Binky Lush, manager, Discovery, Access and Web Services

The CMS Development Team has completed the development to allow LionSearch (Summon) to regularly harvest and index our Research Guides and make them available in LionSearch search results! We’ve been working closely with Serials Solutions on the metadata schema, and are currently testing this component with 20 sample research guides to confirm that they are correctly displayed in LionSearch. Once this test is complete, we plan to make this component available for all Research Guides at the beginning of February. Authors will only need to add a few lines of metadata to each guide and reactivate the page to make their guides harvestable. (Step by step instructions for authors will be available). LionSearch will automatically ingest and index all guides containing this metadata every two weeks.