UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA LIBRARIES -- TWIN CITIES
FALL 2000

New LUMINA Interface Greets Returning Students!

Shane Nackerud, Libraries Web Coordinator Just as students were finishing finals for Spring Semester 2000, the University Libraries -- Twin Cities launched a sneak preview of a new version of the Libraries' web site, "LUMINA: The Digital Library Gateway." The Libraries system wants to convey the message: "we’re BIG and we’re here for you!" LUMINA is the jumping-off point to learn about and use the hundreds of databases, thousands of online resources, including MNCAT, the catalog of over 5 million books, maps, slides, films and other materials owned by the Libraries. The new version has been running all summer and is ready to make your research process faster and simpler. User testing has played a major part in the development of this site, and the results have been very positive. We hope you will find the new LUMINA a much improved and friendlier gateway to the Libraries' resources and services.

Web Design Team members, from left to right: Earl Smith, Shane Nackerud, Jon Nichols, Jerilyn Veldof, Barbara Kautz, Kathy Fouty, Matthew Bowers and Jan Roseen.

• on campus, or through the campus modem pool, or, if you have a netLibrary username and password, access via http://www.netlibrary.com
• Via an off campus Internet Service Provider (ISP) such as Qwest or AOL and you don't already have a netLibrary username and password, access via: http://www.lib.umn.edu/cgi-bin/net.cgi

  Read the whole book right from your computer. The Library brings it home to you for over 1,000 titles! You can preview a book, look up words in the book you’re reading in a linked dictionary that even has an audio pronunciation feature! And now read an insider story on how the Libraries added these texts to our collections and catalog.

  Robert Bothman, Special Formats Coordinator, Materials Acquisitions and Control

  Cataloguing more than 1200 netLibrary titles provided a cataloguing challenge for the University Libraries’ technical services staff, who have worked to make the titles accessible as quickly as possible. Approximately 900 of the netLibrary titles are already owned in print in the Libraries' collections. After reviewing the options, it was decided to offer access to the ebook versions on the same record as the print. Rather than getting two hits on a search, one for the print and one for the ebook, patrons will now see one record that points to access for both versions. Another challenge facing technical services staff was the fact that for the remainder of the titles, we would need to use records created by netLibrary which we felt were misleading to patrons. In order to get all of this work done in a timely fashion, a Visual BASIC macro was written to add necessary information to the 900 plus print records. A second macro was written to change the netLibrary ebook records for the remainder of the titles to present more meaningful information to our patrons, and original records were created for the catalogue where necessary.