Database Logics

Infobib has a collection of Library Bloggers from around the world. Each one has a write up on why/how blogging became important in their country. Perhaps if my library blog ever gets popular I will write one up on blogging in the UAE.
Countries include Iran, Finland, USA, Canada, Netherlands ect.

Check it out here: LibWorld

Treehugger has a great article on Clothing Libraries.

We love libraries here at TreeHugger. They’re a perfect example of a Product Service System (PSS) where you get the service of an item without having to own it and all the cost and upkeep time that requires. In the past we’ve discussed Toy Libraries and Tool Libraries. But it seems we’ve forgotten to mention Clothing Libraries.

The ones I’m familiar with are like the Belmont Clothes Library in Western Australia. A volunteer run organisation with over 1,500 fashion garments on its books it loans out, for free, male and female apparel to unemployed people, so they can look smart for crucial job interviews. We were reminded of this when reader Joe F. left a message on our Q&A post on Green Business Suits. Joe is offering his collection of pre-loved business suits to a worthy organisation, like Belmont. Anyone know of something similar in the USA that Joe can donate his suits to?

Belmont also worked with a men's retail chain, Worth's Menswear, who helped the library through a scheme “whereby customers buying suits from its stores were offered a $ 50 trade-in on an old suit that had been dry cleaned.” These trade-ins were then donated to the library. For other clothing libraries, elsewhere in Australia, have a look at their list.

Also of interest in this vein is the Maternity Clothes Library run by the La Leche League in the UK. For a tiny fee of about £2 expecting mothers can borrow maternity clothes for the duration of the pregnancy. They too would welcome benefactors willing to donate their oversized ‘bump’ clothing, no longer in use.

I just realized that I didn't do an update on what happened last week. The big event for the week was LIWA (Inn-Reach) meeting at LRS. This meeting was well overdue and a lot of really good things were discussed. For example we agreed to extend the loan period for borrowed books (thank god as two weeks is really short) as well as a much need discussion on the current policies in place. Bookbands were discussed, and my friend Peter can attest to this, I hate it when people don't use bookbands. In fact at Dartmouth I redesigned the way bookband were done because I couldn't stand the inconsistancies from library to library. So now each library here knows they are supposed to be placing bookbands on any LIWA request going out.
Besides the LIWA meeting we had some LexisNexis training. Although the training was good I simply do not see the point in having this database here. Not only does it cost a lot of money but its barely used, quite frankly I think it may be over the heads of many of our students and probably faculty. I also find it extremely difficult to work with. Since its more of a robust database it requires some actual searching knowledge. Not only that but it sucks trying to get WebBridge to work with it.
On a non work related note my wife and son took a trip to Egypt and had a lovely time traveling down the Nile (or is it up the Nile?). They visited lots of temples, saw the sound and light show in Karnak, and did lots of shopping. My wife got me the newest Egyptian National Team jersey which I love. Nice way to spend a week I would say.

Hey heres something I have never heard before. A Dubai man was held at Atlanta International for six hours because he was flying in from Dubai. My favorite part of this article is the quote from the TSA at the end:

"TSA does not conduct ethnic or religious profiling, and employs multiple checks and balances to ensure profiling does not happen."

Isn't that the biggest joke you have ever heard. If my wife and I can be stopped for flying to Egypt (and we are American) because her last name is Arab then its no surprise someone from an Arab country would be detained without cause.
Read the story here: Dubai resident detained for six hours at US airport

PS I used to speak with the TSA on a weekly basis when I worked for the Department of Transportation. They are the most difficult people to deal with. They want information from you on the spot but when you try to get any answers from them they will deflect your questions and pass you around on the phone until someone "accidentally" hangs up on you.

There is this couple that walks around Abu Dhabi that my wife and I have been trying to figure out. For the longest time I thought they were homeless while my wife claims that they are rich. She has seen them on one side of Abu Dhabi and then several hours later on the other side of the city. Apparently people have seen them sleeping at the local Starbucks which further supports my story that they are homeless. However, the Gulf News "investigative" team has uncovered the truth. (I realise this probably makes little sense, however if you have seen this couple you will get it.) Internet watchers follow foreign couple around Abu Dhabi city

I have to say that I find LookyBook to be a very interesting site. LookyBook allows you to preview children's picture books so you know exactly what you are getting before you buy it. There aren't very many books but they hope to improve their collection very soon. Heres some information from their website:
I highly suggest you check it out: LookyBook

Journal Star has an article this morning on the fear of Republican students speaking out in class as their crazy, mouth foaming, democratic teachers might argue with them or lower their grades because they are Republicans. This article is about as biased as you can get, it portrays the Democrats as bullies that push poor little helpless Republican students around. My favorite line of this article is when a student says John Bolton, the US representative to the UN, came to visit and his teacher bad mouthed him the whole time.

The day before John Bolton, U.S. Representative to the UN, came to campus last year, then-freshman Randy Woster of Omaha sat in his international relations class with then-Professor Bill Avery. Woster said Avery “bad-mouthed” Bolton for the entire class period.

“It was very unfair for him to discount everything Bolton has done in his life,” Woster said. “Students didn’t have time to learn anything about John Bolton, so I thought they were filled with bad information.”

A political science major didn't have "time to learn anything about John Bolton". For gods sake he is the representative to the UN and you didn't have time to learn anything about him? The man was one of the worst representatives we have EVER had in the UN. Not only did he obviously have an vendetta against some key countries in the Middle East, he also constantly spun reports including those on Weapons of Mass Destruction. Your a political science major you couldn't take two seconds to look that up?
The article goes on to say that students are cowed and tend not to speak out because of fear of retaliation. Please, give me a break. I went to a school that was entirely Republican yet some how students and teachers managed to speak out. This article represents the worst kind of journalism, its spins educators and students that aren't with the majority as heroes, spreading the word of a political party that is misunderstood. If you are that aligned with the Republican party you should stand up for your beliefs and if you are not then its time to think about changing your Political Science major to something else.
Read about it here: Some students say professors express their views too much

I found this excellent post on Lifehacker for a Pocketmod. This is excellent as I have been looking for a way to keep information in something small and portable like this. Heres some information from their website:

The PocketMod is a new way to keep yourself organized. Lets face it, PDAs are too expensive and cumbersome, and organizers are bulky and hard to carry around. Nothing beats a folded up piece of paper. That is until now. With the PocketMod, you can carry around the days notes, keep them organized in any way you wish, then easily transfer the notes to your PDA, spreadsheet, or planner.

The PocketMod is a small book with guides on each page. These guides or templates, combined with a unique folding style, enable a normal piece of paper to become the ultimate note card. It is hard to describe just how incredibly useful the PocketMod is. It's best that you just dive in and create one.

Check it out here: PocketMod

There is an interesting article in the Gulf News on Emiratis who have grown up in the UAE and prefer not to speak Arabic. One woman mentions that she speaks primarily English at home and doesn't want to speak Arabic because she feels as though she might make mistakes. This reminds me of my wife's stories growing up in Saudi Arabia. Her father was Egyptian and growing up in Saudi I immediately thought she could speak fluent Arabic, however, she explained that her father never spoke Arabic at home which made it difficult for her to pick up the language.
You can read the story here: Sorry, I don't speak Arabic

There was an interesting study published in the Gulf News on the freedom of the media in the Arab world. I'm surprised at several of them, especially Egypt being so low to the bottom. Here is the ranking:

How free is the media in the Arab world?
Rank	Amman Centre for Human Rights Studies study	Reporters Without Borders study
1	Mauritania	Mauritania
2	Kuwait	Kuwait
3	Qatar	UAE
4	UAE	Qatar
5	Lebanon	Lebanon
6	Morocco	Morocco
7	Jordan	Palestine
8	Bahrain	Bahrain
9	Iraq	Jordan
10	Palestine	Algeria
11	Sudan	Sudan
12	Yemen	Yemen
13	Algeria	Tunisia
14	Egypt	Egypt
15	Tunisia	Saudi Arabia
16	Syria	Syria
17	Saudi Arabia	Libya
18	Libya	Iraq
Source: Amman Centre for Human Rights Studies

You can read the full story here: Kuwait scores high on media freedom

Gulf News Awards

Since its the end of the week for us (holiday Thursday, yes!) I thought I would post what was happening at LRS this week. This week was once again spent working on some additions to the LIWA page. I have to say I really love Scriptaculous it makes javascript so easy. This week I added a script for blind effect for the right side tool bar, probably completely worthless but I'm trying to see what I can do with this catalog. I should also check out JQuery as I hear its a lighter version of Scriptaculous.
After weeks of waiting III also set us up so Google Scholar can crawl our holdings. Next week I'll spend some time setting up WebBridge so it can work with Google.
The big event this week came to a skidding stop yesterday. If you remember from my post last week we were supposed to be having a LIWA meeting today. Well that failed after UAEU called and canceled. I have to say I'm a bit disappointed and slightly annoyed at the last minute cancellation, especially considering the reasons given. However, things are better now as we have rescheduled the meeting for March 25th at 10 a.m. Hopefully everyone will be able to come to this one.
My final note for this week is a question. What makes a Power User? I've heard this phrase used several times in the last week or so and I'd like to know what it actually means. Does it mean that your patrons use many library tools at once or does it mean they order an abundance of material? It like to hear how people perceive this phrase.

I hate Abu Dhabi traffic, its not quite as bad as D.C. traffic but it still sucks. What drives me nuts is the time limit on a lot of the lights. I'm sorry but if you are on a major road like Elecktra the light should last longer then 5 seconds. Anyways, I've come up a with a super simple way for the RTA to fix it.
Lets say I'm driving on the Corniche, right now if I'm headed up the Corniche and I have a green light I can do two things, make a U-turn or go straight. Those that are going down the Corniche are SOL because they have a red light and can't go anywhere. So here we go the easiest way to fix this is have the lights green if you are going straight, that way both up and down can be moving. After a few minutes of those lights being green they can turn red and the lights for making U-Turns or turning can turn green. When the time limit is up on those the lights for turning onto the Corniche can turn green. HOLY CRAP I just fixed the stupid traffic on the Corniche.
This isn't just for the Corniche either, this method can be applied just about anywhere. I do hope people for the RTA contact me and tell me how awesome I am. Oh and by the way if you are not in the lane to turn right or left (that being the lane farthest to the right or left) don't frigging turn. The lane second over from the right or left is not a turning lane, if it was it would have a little arrow that says "Hey fool you can turn here".

There is a follow-up today about the librarian being fired last week for reporting a man that was looking at child pornography. Apparently there were "legitimate business reasons" for firing her. According to the Tulare County Board of Supervisors “The fact that these two events occurred within a short time does not mean they were connected, However, we appreciate that the public perception may be to the contrary.”
What the heck does that even mean, we appreciate that the public perception may be to the contrary. That has to be the dumbest statement I have ever read. Not only did they blatently fire a woman for reporting someone who was looking at child pornography but they now are basically saying the public is stupid for backing this woman because she was going to be fired anyways. Read about it here: Supervisors back library in firing

Its that time of the year again. Here are my picks for the 2008 NCAA tournament, I've made some bold choices this year, including Stanford making it to the championship. Ill update my bracket to show who won and lost as soon as the scores are in.

Here are some pictures from my sons recent trip to the falcon hospital in Abu Dhabi. See if you can find my son, I've added a subtle hint. You can see the full collection, courtesy of Brandi, on Shutterfly. Falcon Hospital

Lovely Abu Dhabi

Now I'm all for protection of patron's privacy, but come on if someone is looking at child pornography there is no reason you shouldn't call the police. Last time I checked it was illegal, and the excuse that there is a "solid business reason for not calling the police" is total crap. Read it here: Librarian fired after reporting porn incident

Here's whats happening at LRS this week, at least what I'm doing. This week was spent working on another version of LIWA. I just finished the other one but that was basically to get it up and running and get rid of the "out of the box" feel. So this week was spent working with the Script.aculo.us javascript. I've got to say that its a really cool set of scripts that might work well with our catalogue, currently I'm working with the Drag and Drop features in hopes that I can make a more"web 2.0"style catalogue.
Most of the week was spent doing that, otherwise I went to a meeting on Sharepoint so we could figure out whose doing what. I have to say that I was a tad confused when I left the meeting as I really have no idea how an internal web page can be used for academic accreditation or how the standard layout will apply to the library but who knows maybe there is something I'm missing.
Besides the Sharepoint meeting I also had a meeting with Gale/Bowker in which we discussed some addons we might want to purchase. They did happen to bring a long some information on AquaBrowser (yeah!!) which I love as well as some information about adding table of contents to our current catalogue which I don't really love. We also discussed SFX a little during the meeting and everyone laughed when it was mentioned HCT will never purchase SFX. (Here's a small hint, SFX is a product of Ex Libris which is a Jewish run company).
So thats about it for this week. We will be attending a hockey game tonight, NHL all stars vs UAE all stars (yep you read that right). Oh and I finally got a liquor license, came though internal mail today (whooo!).

Here are some pictures from yesterdays car crash in Abu Dhabi. You can read the full story on Gulf News: Horrific accident on Abu Dhabi-Dubai highway near Ghantoot.

The UAE International Book Fair has started and apparently its a big one this year. Its good to see events like this growing in popularity. Read about it here: Book fair signals growing industry

If you haven't seen Robert Burden's paintings you should do so now. I think I had just about every one of those toys. Check out his blog here: Roq La Rue

Better late than never for this library book

A BOOK on loan for more than 100 years from a library in Finland, has been quietly returned.

The library had long since lost track of the loan but welcomed back to its collection the bound copy of a 1902 volume of Vartija, an active religious monthly periodical at the time.

"We are unclear when exactly it was borrowed and who returned it. There weren't any documents with it," librarian Minna Saastamoinen said.

"There is an old note attached to the book which says there is a fine of 10 pennies a week for late returns," she added. The library sticker inside the cover, and the old-fashioned handwriting on it, showed the book was last officially loaned out at the beginning of the last century, she said.

Finland is known for a comprehensive library network with more than 900 libraries for its 5.3 million inhabitants. In 2006, each Finn on average visited a library 11 times and borrowed nearly 20 books.

The periodical was borrowed such a long time ago that the Korso branch of the Vantaa library, where the tome was finally handed in, did not even exist when the book was borrowed.

From what I've heard this has been an extremely hard winter in the state of Maine. My mother-in-law tells me that are getting big snow storms every week and because heating oil is so high its hard for a lot of people to pay their bills (3.35 per gallon is a lot when your tank is 275 gallons) It's nice to see donations being given to those that are in need. Read about it here: Stephen King, Bikinis help heat Maine

A little while ago I posted an entry about adding some JavaScript to your catalogue, adding a link when your title search fails. Well here is the other part, adding a link when your keyword search fails.
If you run an Inn-Reach system then you may want something more then the simple Inn-Reach button, like say some words that say what your actually doing if you click this button. The problem is III only gives you an Inn-Reach token and if you try to surround that with a div or type something in front of the token, it works but it stays there all the time which we don't want. So in order to get your phrase to appear only when a keyword search fails simply add this to your srchelp Y page:

SCRIPT LANGUAGE="Javascript1.2"
function LIWA() {
var srch = 'a class="mine" href="http://liwa.ac.ae/search/Y' + location.search + '"> img src="/screens/LiwaLogo.jpg" border="0"//a';
document.writeln('Not finding what you want at HCT? Try searching the LIWA Catalogue:');
document.writeln(srch);
}

if (document.getElementById) {
var x=document.getElementById("msg");
var txt = x.innerHTML;
if (txt.indexOf("NO ENTRIES FOUND") != -1) {
LIWA();
}
}
/SCRIPT

That should be everything you need to make it work. You can check out how it works in our library catalogue. Feel free to change anything that you want, I'm sure this could be more robust but we simply needed something to let people know that hey you search failed want to look in Inn-Reach?

Thats the new phrase in London. Margaret Hodge has apparently told public libraries that they are not doing a good enough job marketing their services and should be adding new and "innovative" things like coffee shops and vouchers for free airline trips. There is no other position in the world that requires as much innovation as the public library. They are constantly being forced to find new ways to do things because "important" people like Margaret Hodge threaten that if they don't keep up then they will die out. Yet every year budgets are cut, employees are demoted, branches are closed. How do you expect a library to be innovative and current when the very people that spout "innovation" swing the budget axe every year. Hey I got a great idea why don't we run a commercial on every computer before a patron uses it. We can have adds all over the library promoting all the business in town and while were at it why don't we sell crappy stuffed bears holding hearts. Oh thats right because they are libraries not the corner bookstore.

Read about it here: Public libraries told to innovate or die out

Check it out:

Firefox 3 beta 4 now available for download

Please note: We do not recommend that anyone other than developers and testers download the Firefox 3 Beta 4 milestone release. It is intended for testing purposes only.

Firefox 3 Beta 4 is now available for download. This is the twelfth developer milestone focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3. Ongoing planning for Firefox 3 can be followed at the Firefox 3 Planning Center, as well as in mozilla.dev.planning and on irc.mozilla.org in #granparadiso.

New features and changes in this milestone that require feedback include:

• Improvements to the user interface: better search support in the Download Manager, ability to zoom entire page or just the text, continuing look and feel improvements on Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux.
• Richer personalization through: location bar that uses an algorithm based on site visit recency and frequency (called “frecency”) to provide better matches against your history and bookmarks for URLs and page titles, as well as an adaptive learning algorithm which tunes itself to your browsing habits.
• Improved platform features such as: support for HTML5’s window.postMessage and window.messageEvent, JavaScript 1.8 improvements, and offline data storage for web applications.
• Performance improvements: changes to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimization resulted in significant gains over previous releases in the popular SunSpider test from Apple, web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office run much faster, and continued improvements to memory usage drastically reduce the amount of memory consumed over long web browsing sessions.

(You can find out more about all of these features in the “What’s New” section of the release notes.)

Testers can download Firefox 3 Beta 4 builds for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in over 35 different languages. Please be sure to read the full release notes before using this preview release. Developers should look at the Firefox 3 for Developers article on the Mozilla Developer Center.

Note: Please do not link directly to the download site. Instead we strongly encourage you to link to this Firefox 3 Beta 4 milestone announcement so that everyone will know what this milestone is, what they should expect, and who should be downloading to participate in testing at this stage of development.

you can soon do it in the UAE. Its amazing to me the amount of complaints this has registered, but honestly I'm not surprised. I mean its the same group of people that complained because the Indian government increased the minimum wage of maids. "Oh no we'll have to clean our own floors now" Anyway if you want to read about it you can in todays Gulf News: Self-service pumps fuel controversy

Here is an interesting little application called Learnit Lists. It adds directly to IGoogle and displays ten words for you to learn each day. I would love this if I could actually read the Arabic, but maybe it would be good for someone who already speaks Arabic and wants to learn English. Any way this should be interesting once it gets out of beta.

Check it out here: LearnIt Lists

The Aquabrowser catalgoue interface is not only killer but its wicked fun. A read about this catalogue awhile ago after a friend sent me some information from a conference he attended. I have to say the Aquabrowser would fit perfectly at HCT. Since the majority of our students are learning english it can be difficult to create search strings, especially if your first search comes up short. The beauty of Aquabrowser is it provides words that can extend your search. Yes I know there are other catalogs that do this as well (Encore) but they lack the personality of Aquabrowser. Nothing beats clicking on a link and watching your list of words readjust giving you brand new search opportunites. I fully believe this would enhance our students search experience and maybe allow them to find some material they didn't know of before.

Check out Aquabrowser in action at the Queens Library: Queens Library Aquabrowser

I was reading through some of my library news this morning and came across this article from The Gainsville Sun. After reading it I have come to the conclusion that this man is a total idiot. It bothers me that people still think that you can get everything by using Google, hey why don't we just encourage everyone to write their research papers using Wikipedia, its all free so why not.
The problem that man don't understand is that the library is more then just a building with books and computers. It provides a place for those without learning resources a place for people to gather a find material they might not have known about before. Yes you can go to your local garage sale and find book for really cheap or to your local bookstore and browse their books but I guarantee your local bookstore inst going to tolerate a bunch of homeless people picking through their books and since when did you local bookstore provide community activities or bring books to underprivileged areas with bookmobiles. The whole idea of shutting down a public library because it doesn't make enough money is silly and should be completely ignored.

Want to sync your Outlook Calendar with your Google Calendar you can do so now. Just perfect for Saturday evening when you just have to know about that all important Lexis Nexis training coming up that just cant wait to attend. (just a hint of sarcasm there!)

Check out the Google Calendar Sync on Google's blog: Google Calendar Sync

I have to say that I'm sort of biased when it comes to libraries. Usually when I want to see how a library is doing something I check the Dartmouth site, thats basically how I found out about the LibX tool bar which I love. I really enjoyed my time working in the Baker Berry library at Dartmouth and it was really the first time I got to see a library that was on the larger side , no offense to Elmira but the Gannett-Tripp library pails in comparison to Baker Berry. Any hoo I was happy to see that Dartmouth is upgrading to WebPac Pro and coming out with a new look for their catalogue. Nothing against their purple look but it was starting to feel dated. Check out their new catalogue here: Dartmouth Library Catalogue Beta

University of Washington has this wicked Local/Inn-Reach/OCLC Catalogue interface that is simply killer. I love this search interface, in fact I wish I had this when I was doing Interlibrary loan at Dartmouth, it would have made ordering faster. Not only can you do a search to see where the book is held in the UW collection but you can also see the other libraries around the world who hold it.
The slick thing about this search interface is that you can limit it to local holdings, their Inn-Reach holdings (Summit), or holdings from around the country. I would love to have this for our current catalogue, combining our local holdings and our Inn-Reach holdings into one would be excellent and cut down on the amount of marketing that I need to do to get people to use LIWA.
If you haven't tried out UW's search interface you can do so by going here: University of Washington Library Catalog

I was just reading on another blog about IE7Pro and thought I would try it out, thank god something has come a long to make IE better, it almost makes me want to use IE again....almost.

Check it out here: IE7Pro

We recently brought up a new catalogue and one of my objectives was to add a link to our Inn-Reach catalogue whenever a title search came up empty. Normally when you do a title search and the book is not held in your catalogue Millennium simply says "You entry would be here -- Search as Words". In our new catalogue it now says "You entry would be here -- Search as Words or Try Searching LIWA", here is what you have to do to get that to work. (Please note that all credit goes to Andrew Welch at Aurora Public Library for originally writing the script.)

To get this script to work open up Dreamweaver (or whatever you use) and click create new JavaScript. Copy and paste this information (you can change the LIWA stuff to anything you want):

function offerLIWA() {
var notFound = getElementsByClassName(document, "td", "yourEntryWouldBeHereData");
var offerTxt = 'Try Searching LIWA'

var navbar = getElementsByClassName(document, "div", "navigationRow");
if (navbar.length == 0) {}
else { var allLinks = navbar[0].getElementsByTagName('a'); }
if (notFound.length==0) {}
else if (notFound.length>0) {
for (var m=0; mSearch other libraries or " + offerTxt;
}
}
var nfText = notFound[0].getElementsByTagName("b");
var nfAU = notFound[0].getElementsByTagName("br");
if (nfText.length==0) {}
else if (nfAU.length>0) {
nfAU[0].style.display = "none";
notFound[0].innerHTML += " or " + offerTxt;
}
else {
var nfStr = new String(notFound[0].innerHTML);
// var regexDash = new RegExp("\-\-");
// if (nfStr.search(regexDash) == -1) {
if (nfStr.indexOf('--') == -1) {
notFound[0].innerHTML += " (" + offerTxt + ")"
}
else {
notFound[0].innerHTML += " or " + offerTxt;
}
}
}
else {}
}
addLoadEvent(offerLIWA);

The next thing you need is to define GetElementsByClassName as this is not a standard function in JavaScript. So create a new JavaScript page and add the following:

function getElementsByClassName(oElm, strTagName, strClassName){
var arrElements = (strTagName == "*" && oElm.all)? oElm.all : oElm.getElementsByTagName(strTagName);
var arrReturnElements = new Array();
strClassName = strClassName.replace(/-/g, "\-");
var oRegExp = new RegExp("(^|\\s)" + strClassName + "(\\s|$)");
var oElement;
for(var i=0; i

Thats all you need for Javascript. Now comes the fun part, if you had III allow you to see their "secret" javascripts then you can save the files as "filename".js otherwise you will need to save them as another format as the admin interface does not allow you to upload JavaScript. What I did was save the file as css, upload it to the webmaster and then click "copy" and change the file to "filename".js. This is a work around for those who don't want to wait for III to give them access.

Ok now you have uploaded your files and saved them as JavaScripts. The next thing to do is have Millennium load them in your header. Because the title search is system generated page what we need to do is load the JavaScripts on every page (don't worry it wont effect any of your other pages).

Go into your WWWOptions click on "List Alphabetically" and scroll down to "INSERTTAG_HEAD". Here is what ours looks:

script type="text/javascript" src="/screens/bibdisplay.js">/script script type="text/javascript" src="/screens/brief.js"> /script
script type="text/javascript" src="/screens/catjava.js">/script
script type="text/javascript" src="/screens/globaljs.js">/script
!--[if lte IE 8]>

(I took the <> out as blogger didn't like them so you will have to add them back in)

That should do it just save and restart and it should load whatever you want the next time a title search fails.

Feel free to ask me any questions and I will do my best to answer them. I fully admit that I'm not the best at writing JavaScript hence why I borrowed this little script from Aurora. Please credit them if you do add it.

This is something I would like to do on a daily (or weekly depending on how busy I am) basis. Today I would like to take a look at the Ebsco Enhanced Toolbar.

The Ebsco Enhanced Toolbar is something I was looking at while designing our Libx tool . I wanted to test out things that might interact with our current databases. So I downloaded the tool, installed it, refreshed my Firefox browser and....nothing. I tried it in IE as well and guess what, nothing again. So here is my review of the Ebsco Enhanced Toolbar:

IT DOESN'T WORK :)

Maybe the next review I do will be a working tool.

you can still get sick even when the weather is nice 95 percent of the time. Unfortunately my run of not getting sick in Abu Dhabi has come to an end. More then likely I caught it from my son who was sick last weekend. Regardless, I still wanted to post some information about our "new" catalog LIWA. I say "new" as its been up for a year, however, it was still the cookie cutter design that was given to us by III.
Our new design has a brand new home page, new help menus, book jackets, and a new color scheme.
If you would like to check it out you can click on my LIWA catalog link at the top of the page.

Here are some of the things I'm still working on:

1. There is a problem with some of the web links being to long. This problem stems from the way some items are cataloged. Because of IEs break command it has been corrected in IE but it FAILS miserably in Firefox. Probably not much I can do with this until Firefox adds a command to break long strings. I haven't tried out Firefox 3 yet but hopefully it was added.

2. The help page needs some...well..help. This is something I will probably bring up in the LIWA meeting that is happening soon.

3. WebPac Pro or not. I don't know what to do with this yet. WebPac Pro gives me a lot more control..sort of, then the 2005 version but I hate the tabs and I really don't want to have to go through and fix all of the problems again.

4. I'm sure there are problems here and there that no doubt will be brought up eventually. My main concern is the usage of the product. If we are paying for it I would like to see the usage increase and that starts with the consortium.

Id like to end this post by mentioning that there is a LIWA consortium meeting this month that will hopefully correct some of the problems that are currently happening, keep your fingers crossed.

While slogging through my gulfnews listings today I found an article titled "Boston University to set up campus in Dubai".

I find it sort of interesting that big campuses are now setting up shop in different parts of the world. For instance Qatar has Cornell, Virgina Commonwealth, Georgetown, Texas A&M, and Carnegie Melon to name a few. While I understand that setting up a new campus is a great way for schools to extend their reach throughout the world, as well as make some extra money, I'm wondering how the students degrees are received in other parts of the world. For example could I go to Cornell University in Qatar, go through their medical program, graduate and be ready for the medical field in the US, UK, Australia ect? Or are these students paying for big name schools just so they can say "hey check out my degree I went to Cornell in Qatar"

Working in a libraries technical services gives me the opportunity to work with several different library products. Today, for instance I'm working with WebBridge which allows our students to link from our catalogue to the various databases we own (so long as they are openURL). I've pretty much gotten the hang of working with it, however I would like to detail my first experience working with the product. Mind you that I had never worked with WebBridge before coming to HCT.

1. Open the WebBridge manual and stare blankly at the pages realising that nothing really makes sense
2. Talk to my supervisor about her experience with WebBridge which basically went like this "yep we loaded the data and it came out in one giant list". (Its not supposed to do that by the way, its supposed to load each database into its own separate "file")
3. Contact AUS and cross our fingers that they can help us.
4. Go to the AUS training and learn that Serial Solutions labels one of the columns "Resources" while WebBridge's Coverage Spreadsheet Conversion Rules labels it "Provider" (*smack* should have thought of that before!!!) as well as a multitude of other things. (thank god for AUS)
   
5. Download the data from Serial Solutions, change the Coverage Spreadsheet Conversion Rules, cross my fingers......and.....hey it actually worked.
6. OK now its time to fire up the WebBridge admin and configure all the origins, resources definitions, filters, categories, etc.
   
7. So now I have everything configured and I go to test it...hey it works again, sort of. The only problem is that Business Source Premier is saying that ABI/Inform has stuff that it really doesn't have.
   
8. OK so at this point I had been using the WebBridge wiki religiously(there is no possible way you could work with WebBridge without it, unless I suppose your Bob Duncan) but what I didn't know is there is a section on loading your data correctly into Millennium (*smack* why didn't I look at that originally!!)
9. OK now I'm rolling, I've cleaned up the excel sheet from SerialSolutions, changed the embargo data, loaded it and...hey it actually works. It only took a month to get it up and running correctly weeeeeeeeee.

So today I'm reloading the data into Millennium, as it has to be done every month or so and I haven't done it in awhile (oops). I also found out today that our links for Student Resource Center no longer work as we gave Gale an ear full last week for the slow load times. They told us the links we were using are old and gave us these new links which makes it load even slower (hahaha how am I not surprised). Regardless the links for WebBridge now have to be changed.

One cool thing that WebBridge does is it tailors its links by what your patrons search for in the catalogue. For instance if my patrons search for something related to health, Just as a side note one thing that I love about WebBridge is that you can tailor your WebBridgeWebBridge will bring up databases related to the health field. Its pretty easy to do as well just add this as your Bool Query in the data tests portion of the WebBridge admin "q,b,c,,,w,R,RZ9999.999," Check out your Millennium manual (page 106470) to see what each letter stands for.