On September 30th and November 7th (today), the Library Search team released new updates, addressing a range of issues reported earlier on the semester and tackling other maintenance tasks related to our code. For full details, see Blacklight release notes 9/30/2019 and Blacklight release notes 11/07/2019.
Of particular note is the addition of a preferred name option for My Library Account, both in the Library Search interface and in Alma accounts. We now import and use the preferred name information provided in TUPortal, which is used across different university systems including the Cherry & White directory. Over the last two months, we’ve also been doing an accessibility review of the Library Search, remediating issues that we find through manual and automated checks (shoutout to Jennifer Anton for her work on this).
In addition, the Library Search team has continued to work on improving functionality like our request feature and our underlying harvesting/indexing processes (Solr). This includes making improvements to user experience, like automatically redirecting people to the request options after they click on the request button and log in. We’ve also added some basic information about which floor items are in the building and more instructions about how to retrieve them.
Library staff may continue to provide input about the Library Search via tul-web-support@temple.edu.