Special hours for July 3rd and 4th

Tuesday July 3rd we'll close at 6pm and Wednesday July 4th we will be closed.

General Orientations for Summer B and Fall coming up

You can find the dates and times for General Orientations here. No registration is required, students can just come.

Ares trainings for Faculty

Throughout the next two months there are faculty trainings for Ares (the new course reserves system) every Monday and Wednesday. Please be advised that half of these trainings are at Marston and the other half are at West. Faculty members may come to the circulation desk at Library West in error, please direct them to the Marston Science Library as necessary.

The training dates and locations are as follows:

Marston Science Library Room 308 (10AM-11AM)

June: 27th
July: 2nd, 9th, 11th, 16th, 18th, 23rd, 25th, 30th

Library West Room 211 (10AM-11AM)

August: 1st, 6th, 8th, 13th, 15th, 20th, 22nd, 27th, 29th

Intercession hours

We'll close the Information Point during Intercession. We'll be back to staff the desk during normal hours starting July 2nd.

Ares goes live Friday!

Friday June 22nd Ares will go live. All Summer A, B & C classes that were already up in the old system have been set up in Ares and should be ready for viewing.

If you haven't had an opportunity to attend one of the Ares training sessions there is one more left on Tuesday, June 26th, 10-11am in Library West Room 419.

Change in the Ares training room for tonight

Ares trainings are still available. If you're planning to come to the one tonight at 5:30 the location has changed and is going to be in West Room 211.

Tuesday, June 5th, 10-11am in Library West Room 419
Sunday, June 10th, 3-4pm in Library West Room 211
Tuesday, June 12th, 10-11am in Library West Room 419
Thursday, June 14th, 5:30pm-6:30pm in Library West Room 211
Tuesday, June 19th, 10-11am in Library West Room 419
Tuesday, June 26th, 10-11am in Library West Room 419

The survey is up!

The long awaited General Satisfaction survey is up and ready. I've emailed all the current and former Information Specialists the link (the survey is hosted by Survey Monkey) and I do hope you'll take the few minutes to answer the 16 questions. The survey is completely anonymous and I'll tabulate all the responses to share at our TBA Summer B Team Meeting.

Thank you for participating!

Summer A Team Meeting Minutes

At our meeting Friday we discussed the following:

New staff joining us on the desk
Starting in Summer A: Chris Templeton, Melissa Ware, Kenny Herniman, Todd Chisholm, and Janice Kahler.

Starting in Summer B: Michelle Foss and Matt Loving

Statistics
We looked at the new statistics from May.

Also we talked about how in July everyone will be taking daily statistics individually throughout the libraries, but we will continue to take our Information Point stats like we have been. I'll be reporting these to administration for the Information Point, so the stats you take on the Infopoint should not be included in your individual statistics that you report with your department.

Trainings
The Aleph v18 Circulation trainings are finished. The associated PowerPoint slides have been put up on the website. They're in the Circulation Manual so you probably will have to be at a staff computer to be able to view them.

Ares trainings are this month. Be sure to attend one. They're to be hands-on and Ares is very different from ERes. Bring any general questions you have about course reserves too!

Trades
ALA is coming up. If you need coverage please ask now.
Be sure to let me know when you arrange a trade so that I can mark it on the calendar.

We discussed Jana's using a wiki for the Ask A Librarian trade calendar. A few folks are familiar with it, and we talked about the possibility of using that model for Infopoint trades. No change will be made right now, but if folks have a chance to look into that, we might want to explore it in the future.

We talked about what to do if you need last minute coverage in an emergency. Call Angela first, but if you can't reach her call the main Access Services number 273-2525 and let someone there know. Even if you have to leave a message on that line there is now a receptionist who will pick up the message quickly and let circulation know that you can't make your shift. This will be especially important when the traffic picks up in Summer B and Fall.

Survey
The survey we talked about last Spring has turned into two separate surveys.

A General Satisfaction Survey will come out soon and be emailed to you as a Survey Monkey survey.

Later in the summer, before Fall trainings begin, an anonymous self-assessment survey (also on Survey Monkey) will help us set up the training sessions needed.

Additional notes:
Circulation staff will put a desk schedule on the big silver box so that you can see the names of the folks working the desk.

Ares online videos

The online videos (about one minute each) are now available to work in both IE and Firefox. To get to the videos go to: https://ufl.ares.atlas-sys.com/videos.html

The most important ones for us to watch are:
How to Create your account (under Student and Faculty Videos)
How to search for and add your class (under Student Videos)
How to view items for your class (under Student Videos)

To watch them in Firefox, be sure to click on the Quicktime version.

Aleph v18 Circulation trainings are online

Matthew has linked up the PowerPoints for the Aleph v.18 Circ Module trainings. I've added them to the Infopoint website on the training page. Being that they're "in" the circ manual you may only be able to actually connect to them while on campus.

Updated Ares training dates

A Sunday training session has been added to the mix. So to update, these are the Ares trainings coming up:

Tuesday, June 5th, 10-11am in Library West Room 419
Sunday, June 10th, 3-4pm in Library West Room 211
Tuesday, June 12th, 10-11am in Library West Room 419
Thursday, June 14th, 5:30pm-6:30pm in Library West Room 419
Tuesday, June 19th, 10-11am in Library West Room 419
Tuesday, June 26th, 10-11am in Library West Room 419

Dry erase boards, markers and more

We found out today that room 401 (a two person room) does not have a dry erase board in it. To our knowledge all the other rooms have one though.

If a patron asks, we do have dry erase markers in the drawer right next to the Information Point. They don't checkout, just ask that they return it with the key when they're finished. Many of the rooms will have dry erase markers left in there as well (from when they forget to return them) and they should all have erasers.

Also in that drawer you'll see these little foil packets with phone cleaning wipes in them. You can use these on the keyboard, the phone if you feel the need, but also you can give one to patrons who want to clean off the headphones when they borrow them.

The Ares training we've all been waiting for is here!

Ares is set to go up on June 22nd during the Summer intercession. I've taken a peek at it, and it is completely different than ERes. If you haven't had the opportunity to attend a training yet, please come to one of the following sessions. Natalie is planning on it being a hands-on training this time, so even if you were able to attend one of the earlier overview sessions you might want to come to this as well.

A few of the differences I've personally noticed so far:

* Every student will have to create an Ares account before they can use the system.
* Each student will have to add their classes to their account before they can view the reserve items for their classes.
* If we want to be able to search for a reserve item, to find a call number for example, we'll have to create an Ares account (or use the sample account set up) and add the student's class to our own account.

It sounds like we'll be doing a lot of instruction with students and possibly faculty to help them start using the new system.

The available training sessions are:

Tuesday, June 5th, 10-11am in Library West Room 419
Tuesday, June 12th, 10-11am in Library West Room 419
Thursday, June 14th, 5:30pm-6:30pm in Library West Room 419
Tuesday, June 19th, 10-11am in Library West Room 419
Tuesday, June 26th, 10-11am in Library West Room 419

Hope to see you there!