Our newly redesigned website will be right back after this short break!
Good things come to those who wait. For those who appreciate a little delayed gratification, we’re pushing back the launch of our redesigned library website by a couple of weeks.
Here’s why. After soft-launching on October 14 during Duke’s Fall Break, we quickly discovered some unexpected problems with people accessing their library accounts through the new site. Rather than cause any undue delays or frustration for our patrons, we decided to leave the old site in place until we could do more extensive testing and resolve the technical issue. We will re-launch the new site by the end of this month, once the problem is fixed.
During this brief intermission, you can still explore the prototype of the redesigned library website on our development server and let us know what you think. We want to thank our library users again for your patience and apologize for any inconvenience to those who reported trouble accessing their library accounts yesterday. Everything should be working normally now.
For more about the library website redesign, check out some of our previous blog posts. And keep an eye out for the unveiling of our new and improved (and fully functioning) website later this month.
Free lunch will be provided for participants before the event in the Schiciano Lobby from 12:00-1:00pm.
Come join us on October 22 and learn how to best use IEEE Xplore, one of the premier resources for scientific and technical content.
The IEEE Xplore digital library is a powerful resource for discovery and access to information published by the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) and its partners. IEEE Xplore provides Web access to more than 3-million full-text documents from some of the world’s most highly cited publications in electrical engineering, computer science and electronics. The content in IEEE Xplore comprises over 160 journals, over 1,200 conference proceedings, more than 3,800 technical standards, over 1,000 eBooks and over 300 educational courses.
The training session will teach attendees to use this invaluable resource more efficiently, and will focus on several key points of interest.
But before we launch the new site, we thought it would be fun to take a little trip in the Wayback Machine and reminisce about just how far we’ve come. This isn’t our first redesign rodeo, after all.
So join us as we surf back in Internet Time and explore…
Our Library Website Through the Years
(with real archived links!)
1997
J. K. Rowling publishes first Harry Potter book, Titanic hits theaters, Hong Kong becomes part of China again, Princess Diana dies—and our website wins a “Best of the Web” award!
Click on the image to go straight back to 1997!
2001 Gladiator wins Best Picture, Ravens win Super Bowl, Duke Men’s Basketball wins NCAA Championship, 9/11 attacks, Enron files for bankruptcy—and we get Wifi in the library!
Click on the image to go straight back to 2001!
2004 Facebook launches, Ronald Reagan dies, Lance Armstrong wins sixth Tour de France, Red Sox win World Series, Richard Brodhead becomes president of Duke—and we launch a redesigned library website!
Click on the image to go straight back to 2004!
2008 Large Hadron Collider begins operations, U.S. Stock Market plunges, Coach K leads U.S. men’s basketball to gold in Beijing Olympics, Barack Obama elected President—and we released the first mobile version of our website!
Click on the image to go straight back to 2008!
Stay tuned for the next chapter in our online history, going live October 14!
Click on the screenshot to see the new Duke University Libraries website.
As we’ve mentioned here before, we’re getting ready to launch our redesigned Duke University Libraries website on October 14, during Duke’s Fall Break.
We’ve been documenting and testing our process for the better part of a year, and we greatly appreciate all the helpful feedback and comments our users have given us along the way. Your participation has made the process smoother and helped us make better-informed decisions about the design and functionality of our new site. Thank you!
With October 14 less than a week away, we’re ready to let the Duke community take our new website for a spin. We’re still tweaking some things and ironing out a few glitches, but we think it’s ready to share. Here’s a preview link on our development server: http://libcms.oit.duke.edu/
(Note: This is a temporary link. Our new site will publicly go live at library.duke.edu on October 14. All old URLs will be redirected to new ones.)
In our last post about the website redesign, we covered some of the major search and navigational differences between the old site and the new one. Here are a few additional improvements you may notice.
1. More emphasis on the search box. Library websites are different from other university websites. This isn’t just our virtual face to the world. It’s a multifunctional tool, as well as the primary way most of our users “go to the library” and get to our resources. You’ll notice that the search box is larger and designed in a way to help you get the information you need more quickly, with fewer distractions on the page.
2. Easier access to important functions. We’ve added a “Quick Links” section on the homepage to emphasize important information and answers to frequently asked questions. You’ll also notice that “My Accounts” is linked consistently in the header throughout the site. This takes you to a page where you can login to all of your library accounts in one place, from renewing books and viewing hold requests, to interlibrary loan and document delivery, to requesting materials from the Rubenstein Library.
3. Better integration with our physical space. This is one new addition we think our students will really appreciate. Duke’s campus libraries are popular places. Study space is in high demand. With that in mind, we’ve created a new “Places to Study” page featuring a comprehensive list of library study spots on both East and West Campus. There are photos of study rooms and descriptions of their features. You can even filter study spaces by location, electrical outlets, nearness to coffee, etc. We’ve also made it easier to reserve a study space or meeting room with the click of a button.
Screenshot of the new Rubenstein Library homepage.
5. Easier access to international research and services. Want to find materials on specific countries, like France, China, or Canada? Or perhaps schedule a one-on-one consultation with a subject or language expert? Click on our interactive International Resources map and see what resources and services we have available for different regions of the globe.
New interactive International Research page.
6. More personalized help. We’ve revamped our list of librarians and subject experts to make it easier for you to find someone who knows your field and can answer questions about particular topics.
7. Enhanced searchability. We’ve already talked about the redesigned search box on the homepage. But we also added some functionality to the website search in the header on every page. By using the drop-down button, you can search for books, articles, or all library materials without having to go back to the homepage.
8. Less jargon. We’re librarians. We love acronyms, proper names, and technical terminology. But we recognize that not everyone else speaks librarianese. To that end, we’ve made a conscious effort to edit all of our site content for greater clarity, simplicity, accuracy, and web-friendliness. We hope it helps.
Again, take it for a spin and let us know what you think! And mark your calendar for October 14, when our new site officially goes live!
Members of these boards will help improve the learning and research environment for Duke University students and advise the Libraries on topics such as study spaces, research resources, integrating library services into academic courses, and marketing library services to students.
All three advisory boards are now taking applications or nominations. Deadlines for applying are:
Graduate and Professional Student Advisory Board: September 8, 2013
Undergraduate Advisory Board: September 8, 2013
First-Year Advisory Board: September 10, 2013
Members will be selected and notified by mid-September, and the groups will begin to meet in late September. More information is available on our website, where you will also find links to the online applications forms.
For more information or questions about these opportunities, please contact:
In order to make our library resources more mobile-friendly, we’ve picked up a new tool called BrowZine, an app for iPads and Android tablets that lets you browse, read, and monitor current academic journals in your subject areas. And best of all for our Duke users, it’s free!
Here’s a 2-minute video about how it works:
If you want to use BrowZine, you can download it to your iPad or Android device by following these easy steps:
Go to the App Store or Google Play, search for BrowZine, and install it. (It’s free.)
When you open BrowZine for the first time, you’ll see a list of schools – select Duke, then enter your Net ID and password.
Select subject areas, and start browsing journals. That’s it! You can save your favorites to your personal bookshelf.
How many journals are included? BrowZine has relationships with these academic journal publishers, so any journals included in that group and published since 2005 should be viewable through the BrowZine app.
Give it a try and let us know what you think.
BrowZine is compatible with Zotero, Dropbox, Evernote and other services (Mendeley and RefWorks are coming soon), allowing you to organize and manage your research seamlessly. You can also save articles to your BrowZine pin board to read later, even when you’re offline.
The Richard and Nancy Riess Graduate Student Reading Room is located on the second floor of Perkins Library in Room 211, next to the Staff Lounge.
In order to make the lives of our hard-working graduate students easier, we’re setting aside a dedicated library reading room just for them.
The Richard and Nancy Riess Graduate Student Reading Room is reserved for Duke University graduate students only. With seating for 14 people, it is located on the second floor of Perkins Library in Room 211, next door to the library Staff Lounge. (See map below.)
The reading room is accessible by using a keypad on the door. To get the code, simply stop by the Perkins Library Service Desk on the main floor, show us your Duke ID to verify your graduate student status, and fill out a short form.
Access to the Riess Graduate Student Reading Room is available to all graduate and professional school students throughout the university. We encourage you to stop by the Perkins Service Desk for the reading room code.
Students with questions about access to the space should contact Michael Finigan, Head of Access and Delivery Services (michael.finigan@duke.edu), or Emily Daly, Head of the User Experience Department (emily.daly@duke.edu).
Map of Perkins Library, Second Floor, showing the location of the graduate student reading room.
April 9-11: Please excuse our scaffolding here, and use the other staircase!
On April 9-11, the staircase on the right side of the 1928 tower entrance of Rubenstein Library will be closed while workers remove a tapestry above the steps. This will require some temporary scaffolding to be installed for a few days, during which time the staircase will be inaccessible.
The staircase on the left side of the entrance will remain open for use.
The tapestry is being removed in preparation for the upcoming Rubenstein Library renovation. For more information about the renovation, including architectural renderings and an estimated timeline, please visit our Rubenstein Library renovation website.
Say goodbye to the old tapestry! We’re removing it as part of the upcoming Rubenstein Library renovation. It has been on loan to us since 1986 from the Nasher Museum and will return to its proper home.
Perkins and Bostock Libraries will close early at 10:45 p.m. on Friday, April 5, instead of the usual midnight closing.
The Duke Facilities Management Department will be replacing the high voltage switch for the library during this time, which will affect lighting and electrical power supply in several areas of the library building complex.
Notices will be posted about the early closing, and library patrons will be asked to leave by 10:45 p.m. so that the work may be completed. The Libraries will reopen at 9:00 a.m. on Saturday, April 6, as normal.
The announcement earlier this week that the journal Cultural Anthropology was going open access in 2014 has generated a lot of excitement in academic circles.
Cultural Anthropology is the journal of the Society for Cultural Anthropology, a section of the American Anthropological Association. It is one of 22 journals published by the AAA, and it is widely regarded as one of the flagship journals of its discipline. The journal is edited by Charles D. Piot and Anne Allison, both professors of cultural anthropology at Duke University.
Here in the Libraries, we’re especially excited about this development, not only because it’s a great step in promoting broader access to academic research, but because we will be supporting the back end of the publication process.
In fact, this is the fourth peer-reviewed, open-access scholarly journal the Libraries are helping to publish. As part of a series of efforts at Duke to promote open access as an institutional priority, the Libraries piloted an open-access publishing service in 2011, starting with three journals: Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies(published in print since 1958); andererseits, a journal of Transatlantic German Studies; and Vivliofika, a journal of 18th-century Russian Studies.
The addition of Cultural Anthropology confirms the success of that pilot and takes the experiment to a new level. Cultural Anthropology is a major, high-impact journal read by scholars around the world. It is also one of the first flagship journals in the interpretive social sciences to transition to a fully open access model. (Although the push for open access has spread throughout medicine and the sciences, it has been slower to catch on in the humanities and social sciences.)
The Society for Cultural Anthropology recently redesigned the journal’s website, which will act as the front end of the online publication. (The new design nicely complements the print version distributed to subscribers.) But the back end of the editorial process will use a free, open-source platform known as Open Journal Systems that is hosted and managed by the Duke University Libraries.
The Open Journal Systems software was developed by the Public Knowledge Project, a partnership of Canadian and U.S. universities and libraries, specifically to manage the overhead of creating and sustaining academic journals. More than 11,500 scholarly journals currently use the software as their publishing platform.
Open Journal Systems is structured to help editors manage the publishing process, from receiving submissions to peer review, editing, layout, and publication. It allows both editors and contributors to track and manage articles as they move through the pipeline, so that the publication process is prompt, efficient, and transparent.
In recent years, as scholars have sought to increase the reach and impact of their work using new technologies, and universities and funding agencies have pushed for greater access to the research they support, open-access publishing has emerged as an alternative to the traditional fee- and subscription-based model of scholarly publishing, which limits access to those who can pay for it. “Libraries have always worked to increase access to information, and at Duke we’ve made a concerted effort to support emerging practices in scholarly communication,” said Paolo Mangiafico, Coordinator of Scholarly Communications Technology. “So we are glad to be able to partner with Duke scholars and their scholarly societies to experiment with new models to achieve these goals.”
While the floors are being refinished, no coffee or food service will be available.
The von der Heyden Pavilion will be closed Friday, March 15, while Duke Facilities refinishes the floors. While the work is being done, Saladelia @ the Perk will also be closed, and no food or coffee service will be available. The Pavilion will reopen on Saturday, March 16.
For a complete list of campus dining venues that are open during Spring Break and their hours of operation, please see the Duke Dining website.
Undergraduate course and exhibition, Rivalrous Masculinities, explores competing constructions of masculinity over time.
It’s one thing to tell a student that gender is constructed. It’s quite another to ask a student to collect and explain historical images of masculinity. Add to that the added challenges of communicating these insights in a foreign language with students in another country in order to develop an exhibition for the Nasher Museum of Art, and you have no ordinary undergraduate class.
In this case, the class is Rivalrous Masculinities, a seminar co-developed by Professor Anne Marie Rasmussen and Ph.D. candidates Steffen Kaupp and Christian Straubhaar of the German Languages department. They structured this course so that their students would meet and work regularly with students at German universities in order to construct an exhibition focusing on competing social and cultural constructions of masculinity over time.
Click on the image to visit the online exhibition
With approval and funding from the Mellon Foundation-funded Humanities Writ Large project, this Rivalrous Masculinities project team was put in touch with Will Shaw (Duke University Libraries’ Digital Humanities Technology Consultant), who steered them in the direction of Omeka, a freely available and open source web-publishing platform especially useful in the organization and online presentation of image collections. Students in the fall 2012 Rivalrous Masculinities course used Omeka to collect, describe, and share images with their classmates and instructors.
This collective research can now be viewed as part of a virtual exhibition, launched in March 2013 and available through 2014. Students signed up for the fall 2013 Rivalrous Masculinities course will continue the project, this time in collaboration with students from Humboldt University of Berlin and the University of Hamberg, to prepare a physical exhibition of these works in the Nasher Museum of Art in 2014.
Use your phone to book a library study, and see photos of the available rooms!
Starting today, Duke University Libraries is excited to roll out a brand new room reservation system for study rooms in Perkins, Bostock, Lilly, and Music Libraries—one that you won’t have any reservations about!
This mobile-friendly system is a move toward making library services accessible from a number of digital platforms. Duke affiliates can book rooms on their phone or computer directly from the library homepage—a new link has been added right under the “Library Services” links on library.duke.edu.
As with previous room reservation policies, patrons will be able to book study rooms for up to 3 hours per day. Use is limited to users with a valid @duke.edu email address.
Existing reservations made in the 25Live system have been migrated to the new system. Although library study rooms can no longer be reserved on 25Live, class and study rooms in the Link and other campus locations are still available through this service. If you notice any discrepancies in your bookings in the new system, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
The Duke University Libraries are pleased to announce a new digitization-on-demand service that lets you have out-of-copyright books scanned and delivered to you digitally for free.
From stacks to scanner to your inbox. We’re piloting a new service to digitize public domain books for Duke users on demand.
Starting this semester, Duke University faculty, students, and staff can request to have certain public domain books scanned on demand. If a book is published before 1923* and located in the Perkins, Bostock, Lilly, or Music Library or in the Library Service Center (LSC), a green “Digitize This Book” button (pictured here) will appear in its online catalog record. Clicking on this button starts the request.
Within two weeks (although likely sooner), you will get an email with a link to the digitized book in the Duke University Libraries collections on the Internet Archive. You—and the rest of the world—can now read this book online, download it to your Kindle, export it as a PDF, or get it as a fully searchable text-only file. And you never have to worry about late fees or recalls!
Throughout the spring semester, Duke University Libraries will be testing how this service works and tweaking the process. Pending the results of this pilot, we hope to expand this service to other library materials and users.
So give it a try, and let us know what you think! Email us directly at digitizebook@duke.edu. If you have questions, feel free as always to ask a librarian.
We’ve been developing, testing, and documenting our website redesign for a year, and we greatly appreciate all the feedback our users have given us along the way. Your input (and patience) has helped us design a better, simpler, more intuitively organized site for Duke students, faculty, and researchers.
Here are some highlights of what’s new and improved:
A simplified and more prominent search box to help you get the info you need more quickly.
A persistent header with drop-down menus for easier navigation.
A new comprehensive list of “Places to Study” on East and West Campus, including photos of study rooms and descriptions of their features. You can even filter study spaces by location, electrical outlets, nearness to coffee, etc., and easily reserve group studies online.
Duke University Libraries is redesigning our website to improve your online experience!
What will change?
We’re improving access from all devices. The homepage, headers, footers, and navigation will undergo the following revisions:
Faster access to the most commonly used resources
Optimized display for most screen resolutions
Greater accessibility for users who rely on assistive software
Will anything remain the same?
The catalog and other search interfaces are not part of this redesign, so their functionality will remain the same. These interfaces will, however, adopt the newly redesigned headers and footers used throughout the site.
When will the change take place?
We are targeting Fall 2013 to launch the redesigned site.
After the new site is published, will I be able to get to content on the old site?
After the new site is in production, we will archive the old site in DukeSpace, the university’s open-access repository.
How can I get involved?
As we develop prototypes of web pages, we will post screenshots on this blog for you to review and send comments. We will also periodically test screens in-person at the Bryan Center and other campus locations. We will announce these opportunities for you to participate a week in advance so you can join us in the Bryan Center and help guide the redesign.
We look forward to working with you to improve our library website. If you have questions or concerns, please contact Debra Kurtz, Head of Digital Experience Services
During the upcoming academic winter break (December 17-January 8), Perkins, Law, and Ford libraries will be moving interlibrary loan operations from a locally hosted computer server to OCLC, a non-profit computer service and research organization.
As part of this transfer of service, all data associated with document delivery operations (ILLiad) will need to be transferred to OCLC. To prepare library files for this transfer, we will be shutting down access to our local interlibrary loan service on the morning of Friday, December 14. OCLC will begin building the interlibrary loan files on their computers on Monday, December 17, a process they expect to take a few days.
During this process, neither library staff nor library patrons will have access to their ILLiad accounts or files, and all system functionality will be inaccessible for transaction processing. Please plan ahead for requesting materials. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and thank you for your patience as we work to update our system.
Duke library users and Duke alumni will soon have a trove of new ebooks at their fingertips.
Approximately 1,500 scholarly monographs by Oxford University Press and its affiliates are now available as ebooks in the library catalog, with approximately 9,000 more to come later this year.
The development is part of an innovative deal brokered by Oxford University Press and the Triangle Research Libraries Network consortium (TRLN).
The ebooks are fully searchable and allow for unlimited user access, so that multiple people can read them at the same time. In addition, one shared print copy of each humanities and social science title will be held at Duke’s Library Service Center and be available for use by all TRLN institutions (Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill, NCSU, NCCU).
“The partnership allows for expanded access to scholarly material, with less overlap, at a lower cost to each TRLN institution,” says Aisha Harvey, Head of Collection Development at Duke University Libraries. “It also gives researchers the option of using a print or digital copy, depending on their personal preference.”
This access agreement is one of the first of its kind to allow shared e-book access among cooperating libraries. Another noteworthy aspect is that the ebooks will be fully available to all Duke alumni. Most ebooks in the Libraries’ collection are not accessible to alumni, due to copyright and licensing restrictions. But the new arrangement expands the Libraries’ offerings to Duke graduates. (A variety of library services and resources are already available for free to all Duke alumni, including some of our most popular databases.)
“The Triangle Research Libraries Network has a very long history of successful collaboration in building print collections,” said Sarah Michalak, University Librarian and Associate Provost at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and chair of the TRLN Executive Committee.
Last year, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, TRLN sponsored a “Beyond Print” summit to explore opportunities and challenges associated with ebook acquisitions and shared institutional access. The ebook deal with Oxford University Press is one outcome of those discussions.
“The agreement with OUP offers a welcome opportunity to experiment with approaches discussed at the summit, provide high-quality content to our users, and learn more about how students and researchers want to access scholarly output in a dual electronic-plus-print environment,” said Michalak.
Ebook and ejournal usage continues to rise in academic libraries across the country. In 2011, the Duke Libraries adopted an ebook advocacy model in order to guide collection decisions and advocate to publishers on behalf of researchers’ needs.
Please bear with us with we upgrade ILLiad! (Photo by channah via stock.xchng)
On Saturday morning, July 21, approximately between 8:00 and 11:00 a.m., the Duke University Libraries will be performing an upgrade to the server which hosts ILLiad, our interlibrary loan program. The operation is planned to take two hours, and during this time users will not be able to access their interlibrary loan accounts.
We apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for your patience while we upgrade our system.
News, Events, and Exhibits from Duke University Libraries
Emily Daly
Greta Boers
Dave Munden
The Open Journal Systems software was developed by the 
Starting this semester, Duke University faculty, students, and staff can request to have certain public domain books scanned on demand. If a book is published before 1923* and located in the Perkins, Bostock, Lilly, or Music Library or in the Library Service Center (LSC), a green “Digitize This Book” button (pictured here) will appear in its online catalog record. Clicking on this button starts the request.
