The FLC

The Faculty Learning Community conversations are an interesting way to connect with a variety of teachers.

Joni Dunlap, Jenna Ream and Brian Yunke for a next virtual meeting to talk about teaching on Fridays from 10:30- 12. You can join the live conversation on Friday by going to http://connect.cuonline.edu/flc/ any time between 10:30- 12, and typing your name and selecting "Enter as Guest". There are people from all over, not just UCD and not only faculty, who attend as the conversations are open.

Because not everyone can make it they created a blog to augment the weekly virtual online discussions. To get to the blog, go to http://theflc.blogspot.com/. There are two pretty interesting sites listed in the last two posts, one creates an anaimated presentation of your script and the other is a place to share voice recordings.

An easy way to report WCL problems

If you find a problem when using WorldCat Local, one easy way to report a problem is to click on the 'feedback' link in the 'Home' dropdown in the upper right hand corner of the WCL screens as below. It reports the problem to WCL as well as to us and sends along environmental info that can help solve the problem.

Reporting 360 Link problems

If you find a problem when using the 360 Link resolver, simply click on the “report an error” link in the lower right hand corner of the results screen, as in this example…in the email that comes up, jot down a brief description of the problem above the very-long URL that I will need to reproduce the problem.

for EJ

Newspaper Survival Tips For Academic Librarians

An interesting post on the ACRLog.

http://acrlog.org/2009/09/17/a-dozen-newspaper-survival-tips-for-academic-librarians/

Off campus user question

Problem.
The patron was getting the 'blanked out' III/Skyline log in screen even after they had entered prefectly valid login data.

Analysis.
That typically occurs when their computers' privacy setting is too high (popups and cookies being disallowed). However even though the patron corrected that, there was still a problem. After further discussion we found that the link was located in a BlackBoard course page and that the link was not set to open in a new (non-BlackBoard) window. This always causes problems and not consistenly the same problem.

Solution.
Have the patron right click on the link provided in BlackBoard (or eCollege) and choose 'Open in a new window' or 'Open in a new tab'. Things should go much more smoothly for them if their info is in our patron database.