Author: Sue Rahnema

Utilizing NextGEN Galleries for your OSUL Blogs

To add sophistication and style to images in your blog, consider utilizing the NextGEN galleries. We purchased NextGEN Galleries to provide broader range of options for galleries and consequently, their display to your audience.

Setting up Galleries

To set up a new gallery, click on Add Gallery/Images from the Gallery drop-down menu on top or left sidebar:

After images are uploaded, open the gallery and complete the gallery and image setting: Description, Alt. text, tags …

WebAIM (Web accessibility in mind) has great tips on how to use Alt. text: http://webaim.org/techniques/alttext/

If you select manage galleries from the menu, you may view a list of existing galleries.

 

Setting up Albums

From Manage Albums you may create a new album:

NextGEN has great instructions to help you along; you just need to drag galleries/albums to add them to this album:

 

Inserting Your Gallery

You started your page or post and want to add a gallery to share images with your audience, just click on the NextGEN icon to add your gallery

The NextGEN Gallery window opens, at this point select each drop-down menu to to select and modify your gallery options:

  1. Select a gallery display type: 
  2. Select which gallery should be displayed: 
  3. You may have to consider enabling AJAX for pagination: 
  4. Finally, review images in your gallery and exclude any that should not appear: 

 

Remember:

  • Always use Alternative text for your images to assist those with accessibility issues who are using screen readers with enjoying your blog.
  • Galleries hold your images while Albums hold galleries and other albums.
  • You can always use a single gallery to hold all your images, but by excluding various sets of images provide a customize view.
  • Always preview your gallery before publishing to make sure the display is correct, you may have to enable AJAX if your gallery has pagination.

 

Sample Gallery Displays:

NextGEN Pro Thumbnail Grid: 

NextGEN Pro Slideshow: 

NextGEN Pro Horizontal Filmstrip: 

NextGEN Basic ImageBrowser: 

professor lectures

Image 1 of 6

NextGEN Pro Masonry: 

Managing your Microsoft Outlook Calendar

Create a New Calendar:

In addition to the default Microsoft Outlook Calendar, you can create other Outlook calendars. For example, you can create a calendar for a specific project or workflow, separate from the rest of your work calendar. These additional calendars will allow you to better organize projects and events.

1- Select the folder tab and click on the New Calendar:

Create New Calendar

2- Name your new calendar and click OK:

Name New Calendar

3- Your new calendar appears under your list:

New Calendar Listed

View Calendars:

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Exporting records containing diacritics from OCLC Connexion

If you are exporting records from OCLC Connexion which contain Unicode/Diacritics, please consider adjusting your records’ characteristics settings in Connexion by following these steps:

1)      Open OCLC Connexion and select Options from the Tools dropdown menu:

Connexion Tools-Otions

2)      Select the Export tab and Click on the Record Characteristics… button:

Connexion Export - Record Characteristics

 

3)      Now select the UTF-8 Unicode from the Character Set option instead of MARC-8:

Connexion Character Set

4)      Click OK and then Apply to save this setting.

You can do this for Authority Records as well.

OCLC Connexion Export Configuration:

If you use OCLC Connexion to export records into Sierra please make sure your Connexion is set up properly.

Follow these steps to configure or change Connexion export setting and to show the complete export message which includes the bib record number created or overlaid on.

1. In Connexion, please go to Tools -> Options -> Export tab

 Connexion1

2. If you already have a Gateway Export setup, then highlight your Gateway export [library.ohio-state.edu] (Port 5500) and click on Edit. However, if you don’t have a Gateway Export you must click on Create and match the settings to this screen:

Connexion2

It is critical to set:

  • Timeout = 10
  • Retries = 3
  • Delay = 20

3. If you work with diacritics you must also configure your OCLC Connexion Export Record Characteristics… in order to recognize and accept these characters.

Change the Character Set from MARC-8 to UTF-8 Unicode as displayed in this screen:

 Connexion3

 4. After making these changes, please close and exit your Connexion client and start a new session.

 

Innovative Users Group Enhancement Process

The Enhancements Process

IUG

 

 

The Innovative Users Group (IUG) plays a vital role in the decision making process to provide enhancements to the Sierra and Millennium systems. Through this cooperative process, IUG members make suggestions, vote for system enhancements, and are afforded a unified voice for improving the system functionality. Participation in the enhancements process is one of the greatest benefits of IUG membership; this is our opportunity to address any of those issues, big or small, that we would like to see improved.

Enhancements provide suggestions to Innovative. So we have to keep in mind that:

  • Depending upon system architecture issues and the amount of work that implementing an enhancement might take, it is not always possible to incorporate all of the top vote-getters into the next release.
  • IUG enhancement requests are assigned a higher priority than general enhancement suggestions, but there are no guarantees that a specific enhancement will be implemented.

Historically, many of IUG suggestions have been incorporated into the software. IUG’s input to Innovative is highly valued. The number of enhancements on the ballot and number of “top vote getters” for each category will be determined proportionally by the number of submissions in each category.

Please Keep in mind that the Ohio State University Libraries will submit it’s vote as an institution by tallying and prioritizing the top vote-getters in each category submitted by head of that Functional Area.


2013-2014 Enhancements Schedule

All requests submitted through December 6, 2013 will be part of the 2013-2014 Enhancements cycle.

Here is the full schedule for this season:

  • Friday, December 6, 2013 5:00pm (Pacific Time) – Deadline for enhancement submissions
  • Wednesday, March 5, 2014 – Final ballot published on IUG website and IUG voting starts
  • Friday, April 4, 2014 5:00pm (Pacific Time) – IUG voting ends – FIRM DEADLINE
  • Ballot results are posted to IUG website and sent to III by the Enhancements Co-coordinators within two weeks of end of voting.

2013-2014 Enhancements Categories

Enhancement categories that apply to OSUL’s Innovative Interfaces, Inc. products and services include:

  • Acquisitions
  • Cataloging, Database Maintenance & Authority Control
  • Circulation
  • Create Lists & Reporting
  • INN-Reach
  • Serials
  • Systems Functionality
  • WebOPAC

Enhancement Ballots were shared with appropriate department heads on Friday, March 7th, 2014 with the deadline set to receive their feedback by Friday, March 28th, 2014.

OCLC Connexion Update

OCLC Connexion client version 2.50 became available for downloading in November of 2013. OCLC is requiring everyone to upgrade to this version by March 31, 2014. After this date older versions will become inaccessible.

Infrastructure Team will be pushing the new client version out to your AD Accounts on March 10, 2014.  Although based on our tests we don’t foresee any issues transitioning from version 2.40 to 2.50, please backup your macros or any special settings.

In preparation for this transition I would like to share an informative video provided by OCLC and presented by Rick Newell. In this video Rick highlights the new enhancements available in client version 2.50.

Also, if you are interested in additional tutorials regarding OCLC Connexion, please click HERE. We have worked hard to ensure this is a smooth transition for everyone using OCLC Connexion, but please contact us at go.osu.edu/hub if you encounter any problems.

Sierra Update

sierraThe Ohio State University Libraries successfully migrated to Sierra platform on June 3, 2013. Special thanks to our functional experts who helped us with the thorough testing of the system.

Post migration to Sierra, ILMS team worked on submitting tickets to Innovative Interfaces for problems we experienced. Our Sierra migration project closed on June 17, 2013. We continuously followed up on these tickets and managed to resolve most of these issues. It’s worth mentioning that we have a number of tickets at Innovative’s Software Engineering Department; some are expected to be fixed with the upcoming release and we hope the rest are resolved soon.

Server-RacksInfrastructure team and Innovative Interfaces worked together to migrate Millennium server to new dedicated Sierra servers in the Library’s rack where they are now under the Libraries’ management.

Innovative has been going through a lot of changes during the last year. Kim Massana, Innovative’s new CEO, has been directing the company towards a more customer driven organization that’s in tuned and focused on their customer needs. We had a few visits from Innovative staff during the past year touching base with us and listening to our concerns.

Tim

Innovative also created a new position, Relationship Manager, in order to open a direct line to their customers and gain a better understanding of their needs and problems. We utilized our Relationship Manager, Tim Whisenant, in dealing with issues that were important to us and we needed to resolve them as quickly as possible.

Sierra updates contain fixes and enhancements that Innovative has put together in response to customers’ tickets. These updates do not require system downtime like Millennium, become available more frequently and are much easier to implementWe updated Sierra a few times since our migration and are currently on release 1.1.3_4 with next release scheduled for April 2014. Our functional experts have assisted us with general testing after each of these updates in order to verify the fixes as well as identify any new issues.

IUG logo

Considering our size and complexity we had a very smooth transition, so we are planning to share our Sierra migration experience at Innovative Users Group’s Annual Conference in May 2014. 

 

Sierra Migration Forthcoming

We are planning our migration to Sierra for Monday, June 3rd, 2013. There will be a one day downtime to accomplish this migration. Thank you for your patience!

Sierra gives libraries that want to delve more deeply into the data structures of their systems the means to accomplish their goals. Sierra’s technical backbone has been modernized and is very different from Millennium. In Sierra, a user can execute SQL queries on the database directly, rather than looking at records only in the desktop application. In short, the library can search and refine sets of data from the database in ways they could not do before. The foundation of the Sierra Services Platform is a PostgreSQL relational database which captures all of the material, circulation, patron, financial, and other operational data of the library. This standard means a knowledge of the SQL query language is enough to get started.

Data in the library’s system are now available for querying, such as patron transaction information, financial information, and content of various kinds. This opens up a new world for sophisticated searching. For example, in addition to “asking” for basic hold information, the user can find out who placed the hold, when it was placed, if the hold was frozen. Another example is fines: users can immediately tell, for example, which patrons have fines over a given amount.