LibX and Acquisitions

Ever since Robb Waltner took over Acquisitions, we've been looking at ways to modernize the book ordering process. Robb is a great manager and has some excellent ideas including the use of Blackwell's Collection Manager. Unfortunately one of the useful features of CM doesn't work properly for us. CM has the ability to use an open url to quickly search our catalog for duplicate titles. Hopefully this will be corrected in the near future but, in the mean time, I've put together a little toolbar using LibX. LibX is a site that allows you to build a toolbar for Firefox or IE that searches your catalog. I built one a long time ago but didn't see the use. Fortunately, Robb did. Try the UNF versions of the LibX toolbar if you would like. It's pretty raw but it allows you to search UNF Mango as well as drag and drop terms to Google Scholar. There's even a shameless link to this blog. Hey, if you don't like it, make your own.

Laptops Return to XP, Students Save Time!

Back in February I wrote about the good and bad of Vista on the laptops. Well, as it turns out the bad outweighs the good and our laptops have returned to WindowsXP. When it was all said and done, speed mattered most. Here are some numbers that should make it easy to understand. Starting up our laptops took 53 seconds with XP, 73 seconds with Vista. That's over 37% longer to boot up with Vista. Login times were worse. It too one minute and 35 seconds (1:35) for XP to log in and get a useable browser one screen. Vista took two minutes and fifty seven seconds (2:57) to do the same. That's more than 86% longer. Overall from off to ready to use, XP took 2:28 to Vista's 4:10 (~69% longer). Yep, close to 5 minutes from the time you check out a laptop to the time you get to use it not including the amount of time it takes to type in a user name and password. Heaven forbid you mistype or have to reboot. This was just unacceptable and the return the XP seems to be just fine with the students. In fact, I've not heard any complaints about XP or the rollback to Office 2003. Now I see why Dell charges users to downgrade to XP. I still wouldn't pay it, though. :)

Aleph Reports Downloads

Due to increasing demand, I'm starting to put some collected Aleph reports online to download. The first is Circ08 which includes annual circulation data by sublibrary and collection. Each tab represents an entire fiscal year starting with 2004/2005. I'll add 08/09 at the end of this year.

As I find and create more general interest reports, I'll post them on this blog. You should see links in the right hand column.