The New Catalog: Create your account and log in!
Our new catalog is up and running! Thanks for your patience as we smoothed out the last few bugs.
So, to access your account, you first need to Create an Account. Enter any username you'd like, and you can make your password whatever you'd like: it does not have to be your old PIN. You'll also need to identify the text in a picture. If you have any trouble with this, please let us know.
Once you've created your account and logged in, you will stay logged in until you log out. You can find a logout link in the top right corner of every page. You can click My Account to see your checkouts and holds, and renew items. Once you've logged in, you can also comment on stories on the website. Just click 'comments' under a story to add your thoughts!
Have fun, and let us know what you think.
Comments
I tried renewing some videotapes and some were able to be renewed but only for an additional two days and one apparently couldn't be renewed but didn't say so. I'm not sure if it was renewed but didn't change the due date or just couldn't be renewed.
Wow! The website looks great! And finally, more detail about my requests and holds! Oooh, and RSS, too ... how sexy is that. Well, I see several blogs listed on the site now ... I hope everyone feels encouraged to participate.
npersky, I'm not sure about the two day renewing, but we still need to put some messages in the requests screen about the success or failure of your renewals. You can count on the due date shown, though, as it's being reloaded after your renewal request is processed. So, until we get better messages in that form, if the due date doesn't change when you try to renew, it's probably because there are other requests for that item.
I don't see a way to have things from the catalog put on hold -- is that because you're not doing that yet? Or was it there and I missed it?
On the catalog page, all the bottom-of-column entries ("More new items." "More hot items," etc) all send one to the home page rather
than to "more items."
Victoria, we're having a problem where titles that are on order don't let you place holds. We're working on why that's happening. However, on most titles, you should see a "Request this Title" link on the right for each item in a hitlist, or in the set of links at the top of the page when you're looking at the item's record.
As for the more new items... links, we're working on those too. Thanks for all your feedback!
Eli, looks great, thanks for you and everyone's hard work.
I notice two things about the advanced search "search by call number". One is that if you do a call number search on the regular collection it doesn't interfile the same call numbers in special collections - look e.g. for the book All Our Kin and see the shelf list there is only Black Studies books, not the whole collection.
Second is that the search by call number seems to be missing a bunch of title information for call numbers where there is only one book - if you have two books sharing a call number it does the right thing more or less but if there's only one you only get a fragment of the record.
thanks
Ed
Another small thing just noticed.
If you do an author search and put first name before last name, you'll get an author authority page with your incorrect search highlighted. It helpfully suggests to do last, first, but when you click on that it just goes to an empty search page.
Compare (and I hope I'm getting this right: Will Eisner with Eisner, Will. hm, that particular search actually works a lot better than I expected...the actual link it pointed me at was here.
(Will Eisner, graphic novelist, just died - saw an obit online and wanted to look at his work.)
I created my account yesterday with no problem. When I was done exploring our Web site, I did not use the "log out" feature. Instead, I simply went off to another Web site and, eventually, shut my computer down.
Much to my delight, when I went to our Web site again just now, I did *not* have to log in again! I did not have to enter my username and password.
I assume this is due to the clever use of cookies. What flavor? Chocolate chip?
I've had a problem renewing things like some of you. On the old website, it told you when things were not renewable. Now I just have to assume that either someone has a hold on it and it waiting for it to come in, or that their is a problem with the website. Also, another problem I have been experiencing is when I click on the title of a book after searching for it, the URL is not found. FIX IT PLEASE.