You may have noticed that as of last night we finally have the ability to search the library website from a box located in the sidebar above Ask A Librarian. This is the same search feature that’s on other department sites and you have the choice of searching the library website or all of Butler. It took some testing and tweaking but it’s all set and functioning well now. Please let me know if you have any problems with searching or results or whatever.
Thanks.
Scott
Regarding instant messaging at the
Reference Desk, I have good news and good news.
First the good
news.
I have removed Meebo from the
Reference Desk computer and reloaded Gaim, which is now called Pidgin. We’ll be
using Pidgin for our Instant Messaging, which means it will work like we used to
have it working, with it minimized to the system tray and popping up when
someone sends us a message.
Now the good
news.
Pidgin has a plugin which allows it
to interface with Meebo. That means we can keep our Ask-A-Librarian widget but
not have to keep a browser window open for the Meebo widget to work. We just use
Pidgin like we used to and if anyone types a message in the widget box on our
Ask-A-Librarian page, it just pops up in Pidgin like any other chat
message.
This will simplify things for us at
the Desk while still offering the increased functionality that we added with
Meebo. It’s the best of both worlds!
If you have any questions when it’s
your turn to work at the Reference Desk, please let me know and I’ll give you a
tour of how everything works.
Scott
Okay, here’s the latest (and hopefully final) update on the printers in the Reference Department.
Over this last weekend, there were time that there were 30 or 40 print jobs backed up on the queue for IL_120_K. Monday morning, I hear, there were almost 100. According to Jesus, the reason for these jobs being backed up is simple: SOMEONE PUSHED THE GREEN BUTTON, thus turning the printer OFFLINE. Doh!!
The solution, which was implemented late Monday afternoon of this week (yesterday), was to lock down the control panels for the two printers. That means none of the buttons do anything but beep at you if you press them. I worked 5pm to 10pm last night and while there was a lot of printing going on, there were absolutely NO problems.
Please continue to log any printer problems just in case, but apart from jams, there really shouldn’t be many problems any more.
As usual, please contact me if you have any questions.
Thanks.
Scott
To all frustrated librarians and staff who have begun pulling their hair out over the Reference Computers, greetings.
As was mentioned last week, the printer testing that was going on in Reference is finished and we are back to the configuration we had at the beginning of the year. That means two smaller desktop printers and EVERYTHING in the Library, both lab-type computers and student laptops, will be printing on IL_120_K.
We do know that these printers are jamming more than we’re used to and are occasionally having other problems as well. When you are working at the Reference Desk (or even when you’re not but happen to encounter a problem), please document ALL printer problems in the spreadsheet whose shortcut is on the Desktop of the RefDesk computer. If you are getting more frustrated with these printers, please document problems all the more diligently, so we can more accurately raise a stink that will surely reach even the nostrils of the Chief Information Officer.
As of this afternoon we have new printers in the Reference Department. They are the same model of Kyocera printers that we had at the beginning of the semester and which sit on the table there. These are newer than those, and so have less wear and tear.
These printers have been installed with HP drivers, so computers will think they’re HPs and print to them that way. This should greatly reduce the number of printer jams and print queue delays that occur. In fact, if either of those things happens, please let me know so I can track their occurrence.
Laptops MAY experience problems printing to these printers if they’ve already got the printers installed on the laptops, because the laptop will think it’s a Kyocera printer but the network will be treating it like an HP printer, resulting in “gobbledygook” printing out. If this happens, the laptop simply needs to uninstall the printer and reinstall it.
There are no current plans to change these printers, test anything new, or otherwise break continuity with these printers and how they work, so things should be stable for quite a while now.
Scott
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