Blog Development Blog

Here is a little peak behind the scenes at our library. We are changing out chat software. We have offered online chatting with a librarian for many years. As long as we are open, you can chat with a librarian (about 15 hours/day). In the past, we have used Meebo as our chat service. Unfortunately, Meebo was just purchased by Google, and Google has decided to turn Meebo OFF!  Google is trying to push everyone to use Google+. Thus, we are switching to a new service called Library H3lp. This service is affordable and allows for more functionality for our library. We can now have multiple librarians online. There is a great deal of flexibility.

We made the switch today, but the cool thing about the switch is that our users really won’t notice the change. For library users, it all works the same way.

If you want to chat with a librarian now, visit our Ask a Librarian page during normal hours of operation.

As of Oct 31, Facebook no longer allows users to directly import RSS feeds from blogs in as notes. So, we have moved to using the app RSS Graffiti to import our blog feeds.

In June (of 2011), we went live with our newly redesigned library website here at Moraine Valley Community College. You can find an article about the usability study we conducted on our site in this article:

Why we are not Google: Lessons from a library web site usability study by Troy Swanson & Jeremy Green in The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 37:3, 222-229https://www.evernote.com/shard/s7/sh/450c865e-83ad-40bb-9f4e-4f0e8d187872/9056a4a4877a8647823d1de9a2c402ac/res/f0431bd8-c160-432f-9f02-c749a3b9cb15/sdarticle.pdf

This summer we have moved from a desktop application for our CMS to a Web-based system that we can access anywhere. We have also moved to a new server, which forced a URL change to many of our pages.We are also getting ready to upgrade our library catalog to III’s Encore interface. You can access this here: http://encore.morainevalley.edu.

We have moved our library catalog from the old address (library.moraine.cc.il.us) to our new address (library.morainevalley.edu).  This has meant changing durable links from databases, hunting down all links to our catalog, looking at direct links to item records in the catalog, and communicating out to all faculty members.

I updated the library’s APA video so that it would follow APA 6.http://www.morainevalley.edu/library/tutorials/APAstyle/APAstyle.html

I started a twitter account for the library. It pulls content from our news blog using TwitterFeed via our RSS feed. You can visit our Twitter page here: Library Twitter Accoiunt.

I have recently reworked our Information Literacy Web site. It now pulls resources from our new MVCC Information Literacy Del.icio.us account. This uses our RSS Feed Parser (A Feed2JS implementation) to pull the content from Del.icio.us into our site.

We have just made a new video available aimed at instructors who use the classic appeals, Ethos, Logos, & Pathos when teaching rhetorical argument: Persuasive Appeals: Defining Ethos, Logos, & Pathos.

I have put together this short tutorial about taking an RSS feed and using our Feed2JS feed parser and incorporating it into BlackBoard version 8. You can learn more about our Feed Parser here: Feed Parser help page.