Redesign goes live!

The redesigned Library Catalog (aka WebVoyáge) is now live.

This is "phase one" of the redesign. The phase one focus was on an intuitive simple search as the default, and a concise default record display. There are additional user-centered improvements and enhancements that we will be investigating, testing, and implementing during the coming months.

Web usability illustration

A short presentation on web usability was given yesterday afternoon for the Information Services department.

Voyager timeout question

A UT Arlington public services librarian asks "Is it my imagination or has the time out feature of Voyager OPAC gotten shorter? Someone else mentioned this to me last week, so I am not the only one who thinks this."

The Voyager OPAC time out is currently set for 10 minutes. That has been the setting since at least August of 2006. One of the new features with the WebVoyáge redesign scheduled for implementation in May, is that there will be a popup reminder that will come up approximately one minute before a session ends.

-- Michael Doran

Voyager and Library Elf

A UT Arlington public services librarian asks "Could we do Library Elf? A neat idea in IMHO."

Could we do Library Elf? Possibly...

Although I saw a couple of Voyager libraries listed, Voyager is not one of the standard 'Library Elf' ILSs [1]:

"If your library is a Polaris PowerPac (v3.2 or later) or a Dynix library system (Classic or Horizon; excluding Java-based Dynix WebPAC) [...] Other library systems are still in beta for various reasons." [2]

Should we do Library Elf? Probably not...

There are privacy and security issues that would suggest that it's probably not something that we would want to do [3,4]. The blog entries cited don't even get into additional privacy/security problems that would be an issue with our external (LDAP) patron authentication system.

-- Michael Doran

[1] Library Elf > Libraries
o Air University Library
o Eastern Michigan University

[2] Library Elf > FAQs

[3] Information Wants To Be Free [blog] > Elf and Privacy Issues

[4] LibraryLaw Blog > This card is viewed by other accounts - an update on the Library Elf and your privacy

What's in the Library Catalog?

The WebVoyáge Advisory Committee is looking for volunteers to come up with an articulate and concise answer to the question "What's in the Library Catalog?" for inclusion in a help page of the redesigned WebVoyáge. It can be narrative, a list, whatever. Get started by taking a look at our current definition. Any and all entries are welcome. Remember, pithy is good.

Initial presentation to staff

The WebVoyáge Advisory Committee gave a presentation to Library staff on January 10, 2007. We briefly outlined how the online catalog fits in with the ILS software and discussed some of the changes that are envisioned for the new catalog interface. The PowerPoint may not make too much sense without the accompanying narrative, so if you missed the meeting and have questions, please ask.

A simple, simple search

A cornerstone of the redesign will be a truly simple, simple search. One search box, one button, nothing else. A single search box is only feasible if the search "behaves" intuitively, and this one does: words within quote marks are searched as a phrase, words outside of quote marks are automatically boolean ANDed, and the search is executed as a keyword anywhere search, with relevance ranking [1]. If that sounds Google-like, it was meant to be.

Why haven't we seen similar simple search interfaces for WebVoyáge? The search logic is made possible via an enhancement to Voyager 6.1 and thus is available to all customers, but the stripped down interface requires the use of a wrapper script and that takes some programming.

To judge for yourself whether this is an improvement, compare it to our current "simple in name only" search.

[1] Per the GKEY^* definition in the Sysadmin module and WebVoyáge config files. Note that the relevance ranking algorithm is far from ideal.