EBSCO Enhancements

EBSCO will be introducing some enhancements in July and August including:

• Improvements to the overall look of the Search, Search Results, and Detailed Record pages within EBSCOhost, providing a more visually appealing interface to end users.
• The feature previously labeled Alert/Save/Share is now labeled Share.  All of the existing functionality of this feature remains the same. This change is one of several small updates that further optimizes our interface for language translation.

In addition to the above enhancements, Visual Search will be discontinued in all EBSCO databases and interfaces.  This change enables us to focus on additional enhancements and improvements to other features in the products.

Dawsonera download to devices coming soon

Arrving at the end of July!

The lastest developments to Dawsonera will see the launch of the much anticipated download to device function.

Staff and students will be able to download Dawson e-books to various devices including iPads, E-readers, and Kindle Fire.

Also a new format of e-books will be included for the first time.  The range of titles Dawsonera is able to offer will be increased by the inclusion of the ePub format.

Full details regarding device compatibility and instructions will be available at launch so watch this space for updates.

Circulation Rules Update

At the beginning of May a small group of LRC staff met to discuss our current circulation rules and compiled a list of suggested amendments.  These ideas were then discussed at a Librarians Meeting and the following changes were agreed and will be implemented at the beginning of August.

Renewals

Students will be allowed 2 renewals on all items and all loan periods.
Staff will be allowed 5 renewals on all items and all standard loan periods.

Loan Block

A manual loan block will be implemented for students with fines of £5 or over.  This is added in the Reader Record on the Circulation tab - look for the 'Blocked' tick box.  When the student has cleared the fine simply untick the box to remove the block.

Reservations

No change was made to the number of reservations that can be placed by staff and students.  However, as it was not clear to everyone what they are, the limits are as follows:

• Student         6
• HE Student   8
• Staff             15

Fiction

It was agreed that fiction books can be issued as an extra item over the 6 or 8 limit if students are borrowing for general reading.  This can not be set up as an exemption on Heritage so it will have to be overridden by staff at the desk.

N.B. On some sites there may be titles which are on reading lists which should not be included in this exemption.  These titles will be clearly marked as such so it will be easy to spot them during the issue process.

Staff Overdues

A further email discussion was held regarding staff overdues and the fact that the automatic loan block comes into force on day one as it does for students.  It was felt that we should be encouraging staff to make more use of online renewals and, at Guildford College, the kiosk for self-issue and the immediate implementation of the block due to overdue items would be a hindrance to this aim.

It was decided that the block would not come into force immediately which would give staff the opportunity to renew items themselves when they are made aware they have overdue items on loan.  However, it was felt that a block should be imposed at some point so a grace period of 45 days has been chosen intialy (roughly a half term).  This will be reviewed later in the year once we have had a chance to see how it goes.

Deleting Serial Issues with Catalogued Articles

As we have several journals where individual articles are being catalogued I thought it timely, with the end of term upon us, to outline the differences when deleting this type of serial issue record.

Heritage does not provide a way of deleting batches of issues which include catalogued article records - so you can't batch delete in Serial Receipts.  IS Oxford has restricted the deletion of these issue records to the Serials Issue form where you can see the list of the article records that you are about to delete.

Go to:

• Serials menu
• Serial issue
• Enter the issue details to retrieve the correct record
• File - Delete record

When you delete an issue record using the Serial Issue form all the related article records are also deleted. Deleting records in any other way will mean that we have 'orphan' records in the system which are not always easy to find and remove.

EBSCO Discovery Service

I hope you are all aware by now that our implementation of EBSCO's Discovery Service is getting closer to completion.  It has taken most of this academic year so far and I'm sure there will be little tweaks needed here and there over the summer to make sure it is ready for the students to be let loose on it!

The name we have chosen is mySearch and we hope it 'does what it says on the tin' and provides as close to a one-stop search box as possible covering many of our online resources.

I have just received confirmation that our Heritage catalogue records have been successfully integrated into mySearch although this is not 'live' information at the moment.  I have yet more questionnaires to fill out to, hopefully, enable us to get this level of information available.  I'll keep everyone posted as this progresses over the summer.

We have got a trainer from EBSCO coming in to show us around the system in September so we'll be prepared to help staff and students get the most out of this new service. In the meantime please do take a look and if you've used EbscoHost before you should find that the interface looks familiar.