NCknows on TV!

Jill Robinson Morris from NC LIVE gave NCknows some media attention today. Check it out: http://www.mycarolinatoday.com/2010/08/nc-live-homework-help/

Mount Olive College goes live with Libraryh3lp!

Mount Olive College is now offering the Libraryh3lp widget on their library's homepage. Thanks to Heather, Susan and the rest of the great librarians there for making it happen. (note: if you see the link to NCknows, that means that no one is currently online to monitor Libraryh3lp).

Two new trainings

There will be two trainings in early August.

Monday August 9 10-3 at Vance Granville CC.

Thursday August 12, 9:30- 2:30 at Chapel Hill Public Library.

If you are interested, email me (phil at philblank dot net) as soon as possible and let me know how many from your library are interested.

Browser check

Summer may be a good time to get the attention of your IT folks so they can finally get around to updating your browsers. Questionpoint recommends using Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher but since the new NC LIVE site is ideal with something newer than IE 7, why not just upgrade to the highest versions available now? The following is from NC LIVE's current guidelines for browsers:

Any computer accessing the NC LIVE website (going live in early July) via Internet Explorer 7.0 or older will experience formatting issues. In addition, some of our vendors no longer support IE 6.0 or older for their products. For your convenience, here is a link to the top browsers for download:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/default.aspx
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/personal.html
http://www.apple.com/safari/

Questionpoint's Chat Setup PDF with info on browsers.

Librarian is, amazingly, typing!

It happened!

A long awaited development has finally arrived to Questionpoint! Patrons now see an alert that "librarian is typing" when you are typing a message. This means that they will, hopefully, be less likely to leave the session while you are a typing a message. This is something we were hoping to see years ago. Better late than never! Click on the link above to see screenshots of the patron's view.

Wake County puts 200 years at your fingertips

"Both the county's Register of Deeds office and the Olivia Raney Local History Library are offering new means by which private citizens and professionals can research the county's past and families' personal histories. To make county documents dating back to 1785 easily available, the Register of Deeds office recently scanned and indexed more than 88,000 documents for perusal on the Web."

Read full article from the N&O.

NCLIVE and the Password of the Day

NC LIVE is trying to improve the password of the day policy. After much deliberation we've come to consensus on how it works. Click on the image below to see the new password of the day page:





NC LIVE has changed the policy in these ways:

1. First, ask the patron if they are a NC resident or student. If the patron's email is from a NC school or business, or if for some other reason you are confident they are eligible to use NC LIVE, then you can skip this.

2. After that, the new policy is similar to the old one. Copy and paste the correct text depending on whether or not they are in NC or not.

3. NC LIVE has also asked that we encourage the patron to get their permanent password. This can mean offering to refer the call if they have listed an email address or offering them a phone number to their local library. You can use the links at the bottom of the page to find the phone number of any library. Please use your own discretion as to how to proceed.

As always, the NC LIVE password of the day page can be found by clicking on "Policies" when helping a patron and then looking in the "Databases" section of the policies. Also, when helping academic patrons, please try to direct the patron to using NC LIVE and other resources from their library's pages instead of NC LIVE when possible.

We will see how this new policy works in practice. Please feel free to contact me with your reactions and I'll forward them to NC LIVE.