Columbia is debuting a new library homepage on Monday which features, just below its mega banner, a trendily huge search bar. I’ve been thinking about search bars quite a lot lately as the library prepares for a transition to Serials Solutions Summon. Columbia is running a version of the open source catalog Blacklight, but the concept of a massive, google-esque search of all library resources is common to both Blacklight and Summon.

This morning I attended a Serials Solutions webinar on the latest iteration of the Summon discovery system. If you attended the Materials Need for Speed D&R in March, you know that Summon is a federated search of the library's electronic resources that functions with a single search bar and has faceted results. Summon 2.0 is an upcoming release (June) that focuses on UX improvements to the system based on Serials Solutions' analysis of usage patterns in Summon and interviews with students. These improvements include:

• A decluttered facets bar with increased whitespace
• Facets ordered based on popularity
• Fewer results shown, with more information for each result

Roomer is live at room 103 on the 1st floor of the library! Go book some rooms! Tell your friends! Many thanks to Yudan, Josh, Wei, Basak, and Daniel for their work on the product, Hui Soo for his mad drill skillz, and Brian for providing an emergency iPad cable. It was a long road, but the end product is every bit as fancy as we'd hoped.

On December 26th we’ll be making the transition from Millennium to Sierra, Innovative’s new, open LMS. Sierra retains all of the functionality of Millennium, but has the advantage of an improved workflow and development opportunities. The improved UI brings the system up to speed with internet standards; it no longer resembles Windows 98 and includes a back button! Staff users will also appreciate the integrated login, which eliminates the need to open up new “modules” for circulation, acquisitions, and management. The system is also more focused on in-house library development and will give us more freedom to design applications that suit our particular needs. If the talk on the listserve is any indication, Innovative has made a product with the potential for exceptional change that also maintains workflow. Most sites have reported that the learning curve from Millennium to Sierra is almost nonexistent and that most users are able to continue to perform functions with little to no transition training.

That said, I’ll go over some of the most apparent changes in the new system:

Here you can see the drop down menu which takes the place of the left hand navigation icons and the additional modules. If you want to perform different functions in the system you will use this drop down for navigation.

Check out this amazing book scanning machine powered by a household vacuum. Google Books engineer Dany Qumsiyeh built this prototype during his 20% time. It costs around $1,500 to build and can scan 1,000 pages in 90 minutes! The plans are open source too! Makes me wish I had a garage...

I got this email today from a teacher in [The Listserve] and wanted to put it out there in case anyone wanted to help out! Maybe we should reach out and see if she'd like to use Vialogues to host her video collection?

Hi! I hope that you're having a great day, I sure am! I got this "you won the listserve lottery" email on my birthday! OK, since I've got a big audience: I teach high school in a detention facility for teen-aged repeat offenders. One of the many things that we try to do for the kids is to give them some exposure to the different kinds of opportunities they might have as adults if they manage to hang in there and finish their education. Most of the students in our classrooms have had little exposure to the wider world beyond grinding poverty and limited adult support. That's where you come in (I hope).

I am using this platform to ask you to do something for my students. And maybe for students everywhere, who knows? I'd like you to make a video, maybe 3-5 minutes, about what you do for a living. If you can try to answer the following questions, that would be awesome: 1. What kind of work do you do (day to day duties and overall) 2. How did you come to do your job? 3. What kind of education or training does your job require? 4. What kind of salary, benefits, life enhancing joy does your job offer (either now or a range of projected earnings for a career) 5. How could a young person learn more about the kind of work you do?

Novel Projects, of Booklamp fame, has recently embarked on a new Kickstarter project aimed at library-browsing youths. The Game of Books runs on the same data that fuels Booklamp, but utilizes the weird subject mashups to group diverse books and take users on book-based journeys. Players will build their characters and skills by reading and collected badges when they explore new subjects. Check out their video and kick in on Kickstarter:

The news today that Google Books and the AAP had settled their 7-year-old lawsuit was long-expected. Negotiations have been evolving over the past several months and last year’s decision to fracture the militant Authors Guild into separate litigations was the marker of growing peace between mainstream publishing and Google. The results of the case were also unsurprising. It seems like a modest victory on both sides and the agents of this victory might just be the slow evolution of opinions around digital publishing and the developing retail segment of Google. Publishers have accepted that they can embargo Google digitized titles by opting out of the database, but will also be able to opt-in to Google monetization of backlist digitized content.

Mery, Y., Newby, J., & Peng, K. (2012). Why one-shot information literacy sessions are not the future of instruction: A case for online credit courses. College & Research Libraries, 73(4), 366-377.

Long a staple of academic librarianship, the one-shot information literacy session has seen a radical change in scope with little evaluation of continuing effectiveness. This study examined test scores of students exposed to different kinds of information literacy training to determine if online instruction provided a suitable alternative to traditional in-person information literacy instruction. The University of Arizona Libraries are facing common problems in academic libraries: increasing student enrollment and a shrinking library staff and budget. In response to these pressures, the library developed ORL, a one-credit information literacy course meant to replace the information literacy instruction traditionally provided by the library and required in many programs.

InternMatch has two major goals: to make the application process simple, informative, and intuitive for prospective interns and to create an accessible hiring bridge for lean organizations like startups and nonprofits. Columbia alum and founder Andrew Maguire pitches it thus, “On the student side, InternMatch is all about discovering employers, and on the employers’ side InternMatch is about connecting with students without going through a usually unorganized career fair process.” The site has gone beyond these goals with a hearty suite of educational resources aimed at helping interns develop professionally.

Pros:
The site itself is quite lovely with an unusual, but not unwelcome vigor. It has an outdoorsy, orienteering vibe that jives well with its mission. Its social media presence is robust and innovative, a must with a young and plugged-in audience. Their Youtube channel is particularly awesome with lots of testimonials, G+ hangouts, and produced videos. Marketing is key with a business model aimed at employers and InternMatch seems to make position visibility a priority with prolific traditional and nontraditional internal advertising for clients.