What you need to know: Part 3

Great googly moogly, school starts next week! How'd that happen?

Upping the googly and amplifying the moogly, of course, is this week's coterie of workshops, activities, and meetings, on top of the usual workload. Fair warning: By Friday's vlog, I may somewhat resemble Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos.

What can I say? It runs in the family.

Drop by tomorrow for free lemonade and stuff! We'll be handing it out for Arrival Day, and the forecast is that it'll be hot. We're here to help you cool off!

Today, we get to the fun stuff! What changed between May and August?

A lot.

New computer stuff
Really, only one thing is new, and the other thing is new ... ish. I told you about the printing system change last week -- that's the new thing, along with our brand-spanking printers, the Brothers. That's what I call them, mostly because that's what brand they are. I am, probably, more excited about the fact that we've gotten new printers than anything else. We've been using a different brand for a while, and they seem to have a tendency to jam up, especially when a given printer receives a large (2 or more, that is) number of jobs. This leads to frustration for the people who just want their paper printed out so they can go to class and tore-up hands for the librarians who have to figure out how to liberate a stubborn piece of standard letter-size. The Brothers come with a long list of positive reviews, especially handling large volumes of printing, and that, coupled with the more orderly job-release system we've implemented, should lead to a lot of easier lives and lower blood pressure all around. This is a Good Thing.

The second new thing -- ish -- is Windows 7. At long last, our public computers have been updated to Microsoft's newest operating system, just in time for the Fall semester! Granted, this probably sounds pretty cosmetic, but you'll appreciate it more if you've ever used one of our computers and had to wait five minutes or more for it to be ready to use. Windows XP appears to have been the wrench in the works in that case; when a student logs on with their username and password, the system automatically creates a profile on that computer. This profile doesn't actually hold any information, but it still exists in its own block of memory, and when profiles accumulate, the computer's memory becomes occupied, and things slow right down. We've had to have ITS technicians come in every few months and delete the accumulated profiles off of each computer, which is a significant inconvenience for the Library, ITS, and our users. Windows 7 should fix that and speed things up a little, so we're looking forward to it!

New Web site design
We redesigned our Web site -- library.gallaudet.edu -- this summer. Finding important information on the old site wasn't too easy because the layout was fairly spread out, leading to lots of scrolling and hunting. This time, everything that belongs together is now together, and it's all been compressed, so there should be less effort to find what you need. Also, we placed greater emphasis on searching our catalog so people who are just looking for a book or film can get right to it. We also gave news greater priority -- it now occupies the entire middle column, starting with short announcements at the top, recent blog posts in the middle, and longer news at the bottom, which will be updated less frequently. In general, we're just trying to make it easier for folks to find out what's changed or been added since the last time they were here.

More space
We've given our DVDs more breathing room, for a start. The Deaf DVDs are growing very quickly, partly because our terrific Deaf Collection Librarian, Diana Gates, is doing a good job sniffing out hard-to-find films that incorporate deaf characters, deaf themes, or education about deaf-related topics. The other part is, of course, the conversion of our VHS collection to DVD -- many older deaf films that have either passed out of copyright or were produced at Gallaudet are being transferred to DVD for purposes of preservation and clarity. In addition to that, VHS tape degrades shockingly quickly, especially considering how much use they get here, so where possible, damaged copies are being replaced with DVD versions. DVDs also take up less space than VHS, so that's one major consideration.

Our General DVD collection is also growing, albeit more slowly (we are an academic library, after all, so the main growth is occurring in documentaries closely tied to the curriculum), so that, coupled with the Deaf DVD collection, means we decided to split them up. They used to share a single shelf unit, Deaf on one side and General on the other. Now they each occupy their own, which gives us room to grow!

Also, Jane Rutherford's been slaving over our periodical collection all summer. She took on a herculean task, sorting through a few hundred subscriptions, figuring out which records needed to be updated, which had ancient issues that needed to be discarded, which subscriptions needed to be canceled, and coming to each of the other librarians in turn to get our decisions on titles in our fields. Poor Jane -- I think most of us started dreading the sight of her coming our way! In general, she chose to devote her time to accelerating a project that's always going on, but which she decided she'd like to see finished before her retirement. This leads us to ...

Jane Rutherford's retirement
We did a whole blog post about that one. I'm still sad. We've got Elizabeth Henry now, so we're doing fine, but as wonderful as Elizabeth is, Jane isn't replaceable. Her last day at work will be this Friday; time's running out to drop by, shake her hand, and wish her well!

LibGuides tutorial
We also made a video tutorial on the basics of using and navigating a LibGuide; it's available on libguides.gallaudet.edu. Granted, the quality isn't great -- that's partly because the only way we could get it onto the page was through YouTube, which compresses it considerably. Still, you will be able to see the basic information (especially if you view it in fullscreen mode), and the captions are pretty clear! We're working on a better solution, though, so hang in there.

The blog
Well ... you've seen it. It's all part of our drive toward better communication with the community we serve, which involves making blog posts more focused and readable, adding vlogs so you get to see the people here (but mostly me, because it turns out I secretly dig being in front of a camera -- who knew?), and making announcements easier to get to.

New catalog ... which is actually pending
Sort of. The Consortium has been looking for new solutions for our patrons, which have thus far tended to involve combining books and articles into a single search. This means you'll be able to find both in our catalog, so if you're looking for something that would appear in Ebsco or ProQuest or other databases, but are not sure where to look, you might be able to use our catalog to get there. It'll make everyone's lives much easier. In the meantime, we're still looking and figuring out how to put the pieces together. You'll get more information on that in a couple months.

That wraps up our What You Need to Know series for this year. We'll end the week on Friday with another book review vlog, and next week will see a few announcements. In the meantime, orientation week is happening all around us, and classes begin next week! If you're starting out at Gallaudet, welcome! If you're returning after last year, welcome back!