February 29, 2016 3D Printer Arrives

It's here!! We have officially leaped into a new world on this exciting leap day! The 3D printer arrived today. Garrett M. even went to the Campus Post Office to pick it up. When he brought it back, he unpacked and set it up.  It was amazing how easy and intuitive it was to setup and operate. We are so excited to dig in and start using it. During the set up project, we actually produced a nut and bolt. If that wasn't amazing enough, we were able to take a picture of the project from the camera inside the printer!

We are hoping to have the policies and instructions finalized by the end of Spring Break so that we can start training the Informatics Staff. After that we will be able to print projects for our patrons.

Below are a few pictures of our setup process:

 

 

 

 

Presentation TV

We are so excited! Our presentation TV on the second floor is the first item from the generous donation to be made available for our patrons to use! To see the new policy visit http://library.olivet.edu --> About --> Library Policies. Enjoy the pictures below taken by Nick R.

Also, our 3D printer should arrive next week! We are looking forward to Spring Break so that we will have time to work with it and get it working.

 

Benner Bulletins

Benner Bulletins Application

One of our student developers, Tom, completed an application for us this past week. I consider it a personal present! I am so excited about using it. It is called Benner Bulletins and it will save Matt and I sooooo much time!

On the library home page, there is a series of graphics that scroll on the bottom of the screen. We have named these the Benner Bulletins. Every time a Benner Bulletin has to be updated we have an entire workflow we have to go through. We have to open the php file and make the changes to the entry - then we have to go to SourceTree, make notation about the changes and commit the changes - then we have to go to BitBucket and merge our changes - then we have to go back to SourceTree and pull the changes so that they will replace the live files. You can see why this gets frustrating, especially if you have a very minute change.

Tom's program allows us to go to the program and make the changes. These changes go live immediately and we do not have to follow the normal web page workflow. Yeah!!! It's wonderful. As if that wasn't enough! There's even more! It allows us to schedule Benner Bulletins. We can put them in and set the time they appear live on the website and the time they disappear off the website! It's like magic. Now, we don't have to worry about being at work during a certain time because an announcement is time sensitive. We can schedule Benner Bulletins to appear at a future time.

When we went live with the program, Kristen, one of our student graphic artists had an icon all ready for us (graphic above) to use so we dropped it in and so far everything is running smoothly! It seems like such a small thing, but it is huge and will help our office run even more efficiently. Thanks Tom for working so hard!

February 5, 2016 Poster Printer Arrives!

Yesterday was an exciting day in the library! We received our first piece of equipment that was ordered thanks to a generation donation made to the library. We received our 
Canon imagePROGRAF iPF780 
poster printer! 

Matt setting up the new printer

imagePROGRAF iPF780

The shipping company put it "together" and brought it down to our office. It was later in the day, so we only had time to get the ink installed and run the alignment test. 

We are counting the test as our first print job! As excited as we are, there is a lot of work we will have to do in order to allow patrons to begin utilizing the printer.

Alignment - First print job

1. Our staff has to learn all of the ins and outs to using the new machine
2. We will then have to train all of our student Informatics staff. 
3. Working with Campus IT, will be crucial in deciding how we will be able to set the printer so that patrons can print with our current payment system.
4. Setting up procedures and policies for use.
5. Making any online tutorials that we think will be necessary.
6. Ordering all of the additional paper and supplies needed.