ATAC Meeting Overview

Hi all! Just wanted to let everyone know that I'm taking over from Pete as the Libraries' representative on the Academic Technology Advisory Committee (ATAC). I attended my first meeting on 11/16 and here's a little overview of topics covered.

Tracy Adkins and Lauri Goodling are the current co-chairs and ran the meeting.

The committee charter was discussed, along with a few tweaks that needed to be made. The committee wasn't able to meet some of its goals due to issues related to the recent upheaval at the college. Tracy would like to ask the new Chief Information Officer (CIO) to review and revise the committee's responsibilities in light of all this.

It was noted that the chair of the committee is a two year term and the committee is entering its third year, so Tracy and Lauri asked for volunteers to take over as chair. There were no volunteers and Tracy and Lauri graciously agreed to continue co-chairing the committee.

Tracy discussed the OIT-sponsored viewing of the recent EDUCAUSE online conference, which was not as well-attended as they would have liked. She said that OIT may re-evaluate this usage of funds and select other online workshops that might be of wider appeal.

ATAC will need to provide a representative to the Student Tech Fee Committee in January. The goal of having a representative from ATAC on this committee is to help tie the tech fee process to strategic and academic goals, and to keep ATAC apprised of the direction of the Tech Fee Committee.

The committee may not be able to get to the Annual Faculty Use Survey this year because surveys have to go through the approval process of the Office of Institutional Reporting. The new CIO may address this as well.

The committee plans to evaluate the current college-supported clicker system, Turning Technologies. Costs keep going up for students. iClicker seems to be the favored system now, but the committee is shooting for finishing its evaluation very early in 2013. They would like to have a library representative on this evaluation committee, if anyone is interested. I'll send a separate email about it so no one misses the opportunity.

Tracy gave a Desire2Learn (D2L) update. OIT feels good about the progress and everything is on schedule. Training will begin to be offered in late November or early December. Faculty access to D2L will begin in early December.

Tracy also gave an overview of the progress on the Tech Fee awards that were granted for FY13. Let me know if you'd like more details on individual awards. It's mostly upgrades to PCs, MediaSpot upgrades and new openings, etc. The sad takeaway here is that some of the awards had to be rescinded after the RIF because OIT just didn't have enough people to implement or support them. That money will go back into the Tech Fee reserves for use in FY14.

Tracy discussed the Instructional Technology Enhancement Awards grants, which she is funding out of her own budget because she feels it's an important activity. The deadline for this has past, but I know that we had at least one application from the Libraries. Sonya Slutskaya, Mary Ann Cullen, and Pat Leamon applied for funding for quizmaking software for their information literacy tutorial. Go Sonya, Mary Ann, & Pat!

The December ATAC meeting will be held over email and our next face-to-face meeting will be held on January 18, 2013.

Please let me know if you have any questions or issues you'd like me to put in front of the committee!

Fun Facts About Location Facets in GIL-Find

I've gotten a couple of questions about whether or not we can alphabetize the location facets in GIL-Find and why they're sorted the way they're sorted. So, here's the GIL-Find Location Facet 411.

When you do a search in GIL-Find, the location facets that you see on the left are in descending order by number of holdings. This is the way that most catalog/discovery layers work, and I doubt that the server site will want to change it. Even if they did want to change it, it wouldn't be good for us, and here's why.

The first level of location faceting only shows you five locations, then you have to click "more" to see others. If we used alpha order, that prime real estate would almost always be taken up by Alpharetta and Clarkston. Great for them, bad for the rest of you.

After you click more, you're not actually seeing ALL the locations. You're only seeing a truncated list. Eyeballing it, I'd guess 25-30. We have a squillion locations. Okay, not quite a squillion, but 157. In a more general search, there are actually locations that may have a few holdings for the search terms, but you're not seeing them because that list is truncated and the other locations with the most holdings are getting priority. Switch that to alpha order and you have a scenario where a location that only has one holding is bumping a location that might have 100+ holdings and be a better limiter for patrons. That, or Newton holdings would get bumped a lot. Again, not a good outcome for everyone.

So, you say, "Well, that makes sense, Tessa, but, durn it, I still want to limit searches to my campus' holdings!" Fear not! You can do that. You just have to do it in the Advanced Search.

http://gilfind.gpc.edu/vufind/Search/Advanced

Near the bottom of the limits of that search, you will see a Location limit. Select your location and perform your search. You will see other location facets available to you in the search results, but the search results should still be only holdings in your selected location.

Now, I notice that you can only select a single location in the Advanced Search. I'm about to email our GIL-Find Guy now to suggest an enhancement for selecting multiple locations.

Give me a holler if you have any questions about this!