Andornot Newsletter - January 2012
New Year's Greetings!
With the start of a new year comes a new design for this
newsletter.
We're very excited about the many projects we have planned for
2012. We look forward to helping you with new ventures or enhancing
your existing systems, and to seeing many of you at conferences this year.
Quiz Winner
From mid-December to January 6th we ran a contest for a chance
to win a $50 Chapters gift card. The winner was randomly selected
from the names of all those who took our new DB/TextWorks Quiz.
We're pleased to announce that Jane Donaldson
of Smart & Biggar/Fetherstonhaugh in Ottawa is the winner!
We congratulate everyone who took the test. If you haven't yet
had a chance, the quiz remains available
here and is a great way to test your skills and knowledge of
DB/TextWorks. The answer to 2 of the questions is provided in the
Tips and Tricks
section below.
DB/TextWorks Training Schedule
On select Thursdays in January and March, 2012, Denise Bonin will be offering 2 hour
online sessions covering beginner and advanced topics in
DB/TextWorks. These sessions are a great way to bring new users up
to speed, and even for long-time users to learn new tricks. A brief
schedule is below, but full details and a registration form are available
here.
DB/TextWorks Introductory Training -
Thursday, January 12 and March 1, 2012
This session is geared to users who search for and display records
and/or do data entry into the textbase(s).
DB/TextWorks Advanced Training -
Thursday, January 19 and March 8, 2012
This session is aimed at users who need to know more of the behind
the scenes aspects of the program, especially elements of
design.
DB/TextWorks Refresher Training -
Thursday, January 26 and March 15, 2012
Take this session if you are familiar with many aspects of the
program, but want to know more about the latest version features,
plus more complex aspects of the program.
If you're not sure which session is best for you, you might try
taking our DB/TextWorks skills
quiz to see how much you already know, and please do contact Denise for advice.
Andornot on the Road
 Andornot
attends numerous conferences and trade shows throughout the year;
our 2012 line-up is listed below. If you're planning to attend one
of these, please do let us know so we can arrange to say hello in
person. Or, if we're coming to your town, we'd be happy to arrange
to meet you in your offices while we're there.
Online
Northwest
February 10, 2012
Corvallis, OR |
B.C. Library
Association Conference (BCLA)
May 10-12, 2012
Richmond, BC |
ACA@UBC 2012
Symposium (sponsorship)
February 17, 2012
Vancouver, BC |
Canadian Library
Association
Presentation: "Discovery Interfaces: If all the big kids are doing
it, why can't I?"
June 1, 2012, 3:00 - 4:00 pm session
Ottawa, ON |
Archives
Association of BC Conference (AABC)
(sponsorship)
April / May, 2012
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC |
Canadian Health Libraries Association
(CHLA)
June 11-15, 2012
Hamilton, ON |
Canadian
Association of Law Libraries Conference (CALL)
May 6-9, 2012
Toronto, ON |
Archives Association of
Ontario (AAO)
June 13-15, 2012
Toronto, ON |
Special Libraries
Association (SLA)
July 15-18, 2012
Chicago, IL |
Inmagic News
SydneyPLUS Acquisition of Inmagic
In October, SydneyPLUS and Inmagic announced the acquisition of Inmagic's
special library business by SydneyPLUS. The Inmagic special library
business includes Inmagic's DB/Text Library Suite of products: DB/TextWorks, DB/Text
WebPublisher Pro, and Inmagic Genie.
The move will strengthen both SydneyPLUS and the new Inmagic
division by bringing together complementary technologies to meet
the needs of special librarians, while allowing Inmagic, Inc. to
focus on new markets.
More information is available in this press
release.
Andornot's status as an Inmagic reseller/partner will be
re-assigned to the new entity and from our clients' perspective, it
should be business as usual. We are excited at the potential for
future developments of the software and are looking forward to this
new relationship.
DB/Text for SQL v.13 Released
All clients with a current Inmagic maintenance subscription for
the SQL Server or SQL Express version of DB/Text or the Library
Suite should have received an email from Inmagic with the download
information for this new version. The features in this release are
the same as those for version 13 of the non-SQL platform, which are
detailed in this
Andornot blog post. (Note: DB/Text for SQL was formerly known
as Content Server.)
If you have a current maintenance subscription but have not
received a notification email with download instructions, please
email advantage@inmagic.com with your serial
number and email address so it can be resent. Please also remember
to let us know if your contact information has changed so we can
update our records and pass this on to Inmagic.
Please contact us if you would like assistance upgrading or
would like to renew an expired maintenance subscription. We can
also help you update your current web interface to include the
latest features available in the software itself, or with our
add-on products.
Recent Projects
Heritage Burnaby Adds Digitized Oral Histories
Andornot has recently completed several exciting upgrades to the
Heritage Burnaby website. The Archives
received funding to digitize and create a web search interface to
audio interviews on cassettes or reel to reel tapes from the last
fifty years. These interviews give an intimate glimpse into the
lives of the Burnaby pioneers, and cover a wide range of subjects.
One of the common themes is the struggles that the Municipality and
Burnaby families faced during the 1930s when the City went into
receivership and unemployment was widespread.
 As an interview could be more than
an hour long, each was split into 5-10 minute tracks. Behind the
scenes Inmagic TextWorks
databases were established to capture information on the Master
recording with metadata including the interviewee, date
interviewed, interviewer and detailed biographical notes. An image
file showing either the interviewee or a relevant image such as the
location or house discussed in the interview was also added. Each
track was then described individually and associated with the
master record. Information includes the scope and content of each
track, the date range, the subjects discussed and the historical
neighbourhood.
The new web
interface allows users to search for any word or phrase across
the descriptive fields, or by interviewee, subject or
neighbourhood. There is also an option to browse a listing of
all the interviews.
Just adding a link for a user to click and then download an
audio file was not an option. Most users do not want to wait for a
track to download, and they may not have an installed media player
that supports the audio format. Playback therefore
relies on jPlayer, an open source HTML5 audio/video
library which intelligently falls back to Adobe Flash when
necessary to provide a consistent interface in all browsers.
"We are thrilled with the flexible and user-friendly
interface that has allowed us to make these records publicly
accessible for the first time. By also adding the oral
history database to the OneSearch feature on our site, researchers
have the ability to find all related records, regardless of medium
or format. This will be an extremely useful tool for our
users." [Arilea Sill, City Archivist]
Check out last week's article in the Burnaby NewsLeader - Oral histories online
provide fascinating look at Burnaby history or contact us for further information.
New Website for Archives Association of B.C.
The AABC website has re-launched with a new design in honour of
Archives Week 2011 and the second anniversary of Memorybc.ca. This project was made
possible through NADP funding from Heritage Canada, Library &
Archives Canada, and the Canadian Council of Archives. Through an
RFP process, the AABC executive selected Andornot to design the new
site and migrate the current content.
As part of the mandate of the project, the design incorporates
elements of the Memory BC look and feel, with the use of the same
header image and colors. The AABC logo was also updated to a more
modern style. The structure of the site was re-organized to group
pages under 5 main headings and all the content was migrated and
reformatted. Older newsletters were converted into PDF's rather
than trying to retain over 900 HTML pages and images.
Old site |
New Site |
Behind the scenes the site uses the open source Umbraco content
management system and is hosted by Andornot. Individual members
of the executive and volunteers now have rights to edit specific
sections or pages, and to upload documents into a Media Library.
The WYSIWYG content editor allows them to easily type in content,
or to copy and paste from other programs. No knowledge of HTML is
required as stylesheets control the formatting.
The home page is now automatically populated by recent entries
from a news blog with an RSS feed. The same approach has been used
for positions listed on the Job Board. Umbraco offers a Publish
/Unpublish date feature so jobs can automatically be set to
disappear after the closing date.
Redesigning and migrating a site with so much content created
over many years presented some challenges, and we are very grateful
for the responsiveness of the AABC executive to our suggestions and
recommendations.
"Our site needed updating for many years. The new site is
much more user-friendly and is very easy to edit. Information is
easier to find for our members and users, and will allow more
control and diverse functionality for the AABC executive and
contractors. We really like our new logo and how much the overall
look and feel matches MemoryBC.ca. Andornot's knowledge of the BC
archival community helped to make this project run smoothly."
Jane Morrison, AABC President.
Please contact Andornot for more
information.
Tweets
 As we come across news, projects, resources and
other items we think might be of interest to our clients, we tend
to post a quick tweet on our Twitter page,
rather than a longer blog post. We've included a selection of
recent tweets in this newsletter, but encourage you to follow us on
Twitter or subscribe to the
RSS feed of our tweets.
For Libraries
For Archives and Historical Societies
For Museums and Art Galleries
About Discovery Interfaces
For All
Tips and Tricks
Tracking Books that Never Get Loaned in Inmagic Genie
Inmagic Genie has wonderful features for
reporting on loan statistics. You can search the Loans module by
date, borrower, department, call number and other key fields, and
view the results grouped by these same fields to give you a count
of loans for different items. You can also access the Statistics
page to quickly view a count of overdue items.
But what if you want to view a list of all your books that have
never been loaned? Perhaps these are candidates for weeding, to
make room on the shelves for new or more popular items. In Genie,
the Loans database is linked to the Catalog, Items and Borrowers
databases, but as is the case with all DB/Text databases, the link
is one-way. If a book has never been loaned, it won't appear in the
Loans database, so can't be pulled up by a query, and a search in
the Catalog can't retrieve Loan records.
However, it's a simple matter to export the data from these
Genie textbases and then use a different tool, such as MS Access,
to produce a report of items with no loans. We've done this for a
few clients recently, and it's worked quite well, allowing the
librarians to get a really good sense of which items in their
collection are most borrowed, and which least (see sample report
below). This type of report doesn't really need to be in Genie,
since it's not something you're likely to do very often - perhaps
once per year at most.
You can read how to do this in this
blog post. We'd be happy to help you do this; just drop
us a note and we'll guide you through exporting your data for
us. We'll analyse it and provide a report for you (standard
consulting charges apply).
DB/TextWorks Date Searching
In our DB/TextWorks
skills quiz we ask 2 questions about searching date fields in
DB/TextWorks:
- The punctuation for date range searching is a... (colon, comma,
or slash)?
- When searching today's date can be represented as... (@date,
=date, =today)?
Of all the questions on the quiz, these 2 proved to be among the
most challenging for many of you, so we thought we'd repeat the
correct answers here for everyone. Searching on dates can be quite
useful in many situations. The correct answers are:
- The punctuation for date range searching is a...
colon.
- When searching today's date can be represented as...
@date.
As well, the <, >, <=, and >= operators can be used
with dates, and all of these can be used in combination.
Some examples of using these:
- 2001:2009 finds everything from 2001 to 2009, inclusive.
- >=2001 finds everything from 2001 to the present.
- >=@DATE-30 finds everything from 30 days ago to the
present.
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