Recent Changes & Work in Progress

Table of Contents

List of Recent Changes
Work in Progress or Planned

List of Recent Changes

Date	Description
07/27/2007	Usability Changes on Search Page Change: Separated the search page's table segments visually and with "OR" text. Change: Made whole tab clickable instead of just the text link on the tabs. Change: Removed the onBlur call from the title input box. So now if the examples box gets shown, it stays open. Change: Upgraded from HTML 4.01 Strict to XHTML 1.0 Strict.
07/27/2007	Usability Changes on Results Pages Change: When PrintHoldings field contains either "NONE" or "Online Only", the wording now consistently says "None -- Online Only" Change: Fixed the URL in links to former title(s)
08/18/2005	Miscellaneous Fixes Fix: The sad face icons are no longer included within the anchor tag for the instance's get.php link. Change: The strikeout line no longer crosses over the sad face and/or the magnifying glass icons.
07/21/2005	RSS Feeds RSS Feeds for recently added resources are available.
07/08/2005	Various Fixes & Improvements Redesigned parts of the software to improve efficiency, and thus handle more simultaneous users without impacting the web site. Fixed style inconsistency between the "previous" and "next" page links. Fixed HTML entities within jumplist option values. When result sets are larger than 100 titles, the system produces multiple "pages" of output. In the old version, when you visited anything beyond the first page, the URL would drop the search criteria from the query string (the stuff after the question mark) and merely contain a query string like "?pg=5" to tell the system which page to go to. Now the system keeps the search query as part of the URL in all cases. Why does this matter? Before this change was implemented, if ... ... you went to a page 2 or higher in a result set, then clicked any link that causes another search (such as clicking on an alternate title) and then clicked the back button, you'd find your previous search had disappeared. ... your PHP session timed out (20 minutes idle time) after you did such a search and then you clicked one of the links to go to another page in the results, the query would fail completely.
06/06/2005	New Features Links to Former and Later titles have been added to many records, allowing users to find coverage across journal title changes, splits, and merges. Added a "Your Query was: ..." display feature at the top of the results.
06/06/2005	Wording and Format Changes To de-emphasize the "MORE INFO" link that users were clicking by mistake, we replaced the "MORE INFO" link with an "i" button/icon and moved it to the far left. Changed the display format and the clickable text of each instance row from "<Collection> has <ECoverage>" to "<ECoverage> in <Collection>". For example, ScienceDirect Backfile ( Neuroscience ) has 1963-1994 now looks like 1963-1994 in ScienceDirect Backfile ( Neuroscience ) Changed display of "[NEW] indicates titles added since..." to "[NEW] indicates titles added or restored since..." to clarify the meaning. (If a subscription title becomes unavailable for a while and later gets restored, 'NEW' could be non-intuitive.)
06/06/2005	Miscellaneous Fixes Changed title searches so they'd work correctly for inputs with an @ symbol (e.g. "Journals@Ovid"). Fixed an issue with the "Report and access problem" form.
03/14/2005	Help Text Though further revisions are still in progress, the help page has been updated again.
03/07/2005	Subject Access Improvements The automated subject assignment process begun in January is now supplemented by headings in MARC records imported from OCLC's WorldCat database.
03/04/2005	Abbreviation Search bug fix Fixed a problem in title abbreviation search. If the user entered multiple spaces between two terms, no hits would result. Now it reduces such multiple spaces to one.
02/08/2005	Jump to results page Removed the 'GO' button. When user selects a range it will now automatically go there.
01/26/2005	Subject Access Improvements More subjects are now assigned using an ongoing automated process. From 1999 to date, all subjects assigned to online resources have been selected manually, one at a time. Today we began using a supplementary process that links resources to appropriate local subjects, based on mapping from external subject classifications. Specifically these use Library of Congress (LCSH), Medical (MeSH), and National Agricultural Library (NAL) Subject Headings present in the Voyager MARC records for these resources.
12/13/2004	Abbreviation Search bug fix Fixed a recently introduced bug in title abbreviation search. With the bug, titles only matched if the input's first term matched the first word of the title. Previous behavior now restored.
12/10/2004	Help Text The link for Help with these pages has been relocated to improve visibility. It is now a virtual tab along the top of the search form.
12/10/2004	Subjects The pseudo subject of "Reference Tools" has been removed from the system. This does not affect the resource type of "Reference Tools" which is selectable via the search form's top "tabs".
10/25/2004	Subject Selection The search pages have always allowed single-click searching for a single subject. The checkboxes and submit button were prominent however, so most users overlooked the single-click subject links. Now the checkboxes are hidden unless the user clicks the "use multiple subjects" box. Since most searches are single-search anyway, this provides a cleaner interface.
10/07/2004	Help Text Help for these pages has been added. The ORR Help link on the toolbars will get you there.
9/28/2004	Journal Coverage Exceptions EBSCO Online Coverage statements now indicate appropriate "embargoes". More will come later.
9/27/2004	Improved linking to Library Catalog Under some circumstances, the link to the Library Catalog was not enabled when it should have been. Also, the message "NONE" has been replaced with "None — Online only."
9/03/2004	Support for Intermediate pages with Public Notes Some of the resources to which we provide access have non-obvious peculiarities that can affect their usefulness to people. When we identify such things, it is now possible for an intermediate page to display this information before users get sent to the actual resource.
9/02/2004	Support for Passworded Resources Some of the resources we license require usernames, passwords, or other specific information to be entered by the user to gain full access to the resource. We now have the capability of making this information available to authorized users without making it completely public.
7/30/2004	Integrated EBSCO data feed with TDNet We get nearly 9000 journals online in multiple EBSCO collections. Many titles are included in multiple EBSCO collections, sometimes with different coverage. Using a monthly EBSCO data feed we are now able to determine and show only the "best" EBSCO access point for each title and suppress the others from public view. This goes a long way toward simplifying the results and links displayed.
7/19/2004	Extended improvements to departmental custom lists A number of system improvements made over the last 2 months (e.g. the improved sorting of links) were not previously available in the display of departmental library custom ejournal lists. The system has been partly rewritten so that both the standard and those custom lists work from the same set of functions and this divergence of style or functionality should not reoccur.
7/19/2004	Web Standards Now all the ORR pages are validated to HTML 4.01 Strict and CSS 2 standards. Formerly a couple of pages were still HTML 4.01 Transitional.
7/16/2004	Improved legibility of the "jump to page" list for large result sets The previous version of this drop-down list of pages was sometimes hard to scan visually. It has been simplified and aligned to be easier to read.
7/16/2004	Fixed title searching with non English characters Though we had earlier fixed the display of the accented and foreign characters that appear in titles, typing or pasting titles using such characters (e.g. æ,â,è,í,ö,Æ,ñ) into the search box prevented retrieval of any relevant records. For example the keyword search Español now finds titles with Español or Espanol.
7/16/2004	Start of Title search option made more precise This search type has always truncated at the end of the text entered, but now it does this before discarding any spaces typed at the end. This means a Start of Title search for Nation<space> will now return only titles starting with the word "nation." The more typical search for Nation will still work exactly as before.
6/24/2004	Improved sorting of links to resources When there are multiple access points for a single Resource, the historical usage of each one is now a prevelant factor in the order in which they are displayed. This generally puts the "best" link first, rather than alphabetizing them by collection name.
6/23/2004	Fixed: Title searches containing a hyphen (-) were previously not working correctly.
6/?/2004	Title Abbreviations search By popular request, we added the "Title Abbreviations" method of searching. This works well when you copy & paste a journal name from elsewhere into the search box.
6/13/2004	Links to the old ORR search page were forwarded to the new search page, and the old one disabled.
6/11/2004	Added new subjects "Film" and "Theatre".
6/?/2004	The process of importing titles from the online catalog was improved to convert the USMARC diacritics into the correct Latin characters. Thus, foreign titles should now display correctly.
6/1/2004	Most links on the Library's Gateway (web site) are changed to link directly to this new ORR system. A prominent notice and link to the old interface is inserted to provide users access to the old interface until the end of Summer term I (June 13).
5/18/2004	The first production phase of implementation begins. Links to resources in the old system now get mapped through the new database semi-transparently. In cases where there is single exactly one available access point for that title, the user gets forwarded automatically and immediately. In cases where multiple access points are now available, the user sees a result display showing all the current links for that title.
4/1/2004	Most maintenance of information in the old ORR system ceases so that much of the old information can be migrated to the new database structure.

Work in Progress or Planned

Type of Change	Description
Results Display	Journal Coverage Exceptions Many journal publishers impose delayed access (known as "embargoes") for their online versions, to help maintain print subscriptions. Because of this, the actual online availability for many journals saying something-Present aren't accurate. We're working on adding information for these delays to the coverage information. Note: Partially implemented 09/28/2004.
Results Display	Hide and/or collapse multiple confusing access points In many cases, there are multiple access points (links) for a single title (particularly for journals). Some of these are typically "better" than others, and some of them result in sending you to the same web site as others. So we're continuing to work on collapsing the equivalent entries into one, as well as making the sort order better. For many titles, however these different links provide different years of coverage, so they won't all be eliminated. Note: Partially implemented 07/30/2004.
Results Display	Group results by type When searching from the "All" resources page, the results will be grouped by resource type with headings. This will be similar to the behavior of the previous system, e.g. "Your results returned 10 results: 5 journals, 4 article indexes, and 1 newspaper."
Reference Tools	Include Reference Library's Online Collection Eventually, the majority of resources listed on the Reference Library's Online Reference Collection will be integrated into this system. We'll be adding other "subjects" to allow for categorization similar to their current arrangement.
Search Page	When returning to the search page via the "Modify My Search" after doing a subject-based search, subject(s) that had been selected or directly clicked should be automatically checked.