Andy's blog

I've never been very good at remembering things. The birthday card I forgot to send, what happened last week, even my wife's name has alluded me on a couple of occasions. People who have the ability to recall facts and figures at the drop of a hat have always amazed me.

Ever since the changes to HE education funding were announced there have been various ongoing debates surrounding the identity of the student. Universities (or at least the public funded ones) are revolting against the idea of the student a a consumer preferring terms like partner or even consumer.

I'm testing adding share buttons to my blog posts....

Tweet

By now most people are aware that I have a new job at Kent University as a Project Manager within the Templeman Library.

http://www.kent.ac.uk/library/

The post is a two year fixed term contract, managing an array of change projects in the area of library technology. This role couldn't be more appropriate for me at this point in my career and will hopefully extend and expand my experience of managing lib-tech projects. I start my new role on the 19th March.

We're in the processes of evaluating MetaLib+ (a convergence of Primo Central and MetaLib). As well as searching the mega-aggregated index of resources (the Primo Central Index), Primo Central has the ability to lookup e-journals via the SFX A-Z list and lookup and search databases via a lightbox that uses MetaLib functionality.

The MetaLib lightbox is a nice touch and makes what is an old technology seem modern and fresh:

Recently our Sony Cyber-Shot camera crashed taking the Sony memory stick with it. On inspection the memory stick looked like it had some physical damage, probably caused by inserting it too forcefully.

By my reckoning we had around 200 photos on there that included a holiday, birthday parties, and loads of photos of our new house prior to doing it up. I was really pissed-off to say the least!

I then found Save My USB on the net:

http://www.savemyusb.com/

I attended the first meeting of the SCONUL Higher Education Library Technology (HELibTech) wiki content editors yesterday. A discussion about collaboration of ideas reminded me of the presentation on the EL Commons I gave at the EPUG-UKI conference this year.

Easing myself back in the blogging hot seat with a little post about 'what I learnt this week'.

#1

Creating deeplinks (predominantly in the VLE) to online resources has always been difficult. By deeplinks I mean links that go further than just the homepage. The link might be to a journal homepage, a specific volume, or a specific article. The problem fro us has always been twofold:

1. The composition of the link (the URL) is vastly different for every online resource provider. This makes it incredibly difficult to produce a guide (or guides) on how to construct links.

I've been thinking about ordering some moo MiniCards. For those that haven't seen these before, they are small, inexpensive business cards: