New, shiny things @ your neighborhood university library

Today saw the launch of two major projects from Miami University:

New website! We finally got to move away from the university template (which didn’t allow room for much of anything) and this is the product that was years in the making. The site was build with drupal and right in the middle of the front page is MULtifacet, our home-grown next-gen OPAC. We just finished a two-phased usability study on MULtifacet and its former incarnation, Solrpac. Still in the analysis stage, but once the report is finished, I’ll let you all know.

New orientation video! While a vodcast isn’t anything new to MU, producing a vodcast in Mandarin Chinese is. This is part of the Libraries’ plan to accommodate the near 500% increase in international students coming to MU in the last five years, with the majority coming from China. We have plans to create other videos in other native languages of our international and ESL students.

New, shiny things are good! Especially before the students come back…