Academic Success Centre staff at Gerstein

Earlier this year, staff from the Academic Success Centre (of the Koffler Student Centre) set up shop at our information desk for a trial project.

Beginning Wednesday September 28, the learning skills counsellors from the Koffler Centre's Academic Success Centre will again join Gerstein's usual staff at the information desk to advise students on general academic techniques.

They will be available for advice on strategic reading, time management, preparing for tests, understanding assignments, etc.

They will be stationed at the sit down side of the information desk from 1-3 on Wednesdays.

Staffing the service will be: Susan Hopkirk, Kathy Chung and Nellie Perrett.

Susanne Tabur
Sept 26

Antivirus changes

As of fall 2011 the Information Commons is no longer giving away Symantec Antivirus to students.
It is still available for staff.

Students will still have access to free security software.
The web page address for information on antivirus remains the same and has various suggestions for Windows and Mac users.
http://antivirus.utoronto.ca/

The students that usually "need" to get antivirus, are undergrads with Windows machines. They are the group that is infrequently asked to run the ESP scan. If they have no antivirus on their computer they cannot pass the scan and use our wireless network.
This means that most questions will be from Windows users. And the antivirus page is now referring them to Microsoft Security Essentials.

U of T Wireless (new network connection)

The old UTORwin wireless network connection will continue, but alongside it users can now see the UofT wireless network connection.

This new connection supports a, b, g, and "n" ranges. It should work better at longer distances because it has "n", and UTORwin does not.

It requires that the user logs in only once. So it is very convenient compared to UTORwin where a user must login in everytime. This benefits handheld users a lot. However it is not recommended for anyone that "shares" their device with others. (not good for multiple UTORid logins)

For a period of time users will have to use the UTORid "verify" procedure before connecting for the first time. They only have to validate once, but hopefully this will be changed soon so no one ever has to do it.
VERIFY HERE: https://www.utorid.utoronto.ca/

More information from the InfoCommons Knowledge Base here:
http://help.ic.utoronto.ca/index.php?action=artikel&lang=en&cat=20&id=704&artlang=en#UofT
Short link to the same information: uoft.me/icuoft

UTMail+ (new student email system)

Some links regarding the new web-based email system that began August 2011:

For information on the service:
http://email.utoronto.ca/

To login to the service:
http://mail.utoronto.ca/

IC Knowledge Base help on all aspects of UTMail+:
http://help.ic.utoronto.ca/category/3/UTmail.html

IC Knowledge Base help on the email portion of UTMail+:
http://help.ic.utoronto.ca/solution_id_1774.html

Update on new library online services

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Summon update
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As described previously, we are currently making a technical change in how we retrieve Article (Summon) results, to allow us to integrate the digital rights for our online resources into the Summon display. This work is ongoing and will be completed within the coming week. Once done, the Summon (Article) results will be presented in a way that is visually consistent with our other library web pages. Summon functionality will remain the same. We will notify you when this step is completed.

After this work is completed, we will add the ability to easily switch from catalogue to article search results, within the Endeca interface. After that, we will integrate Recommended Databases and Library Web Pages into our search results.

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Summon Tips and tricks
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1. Summon includes and indexes more data than it displays. For example, you can locate articles within Summon by searching on their PubMed identifiers, even though the PMIDs are not displayed in Summon.

2. Serials Solutions is currently indexing the full text of recently published books that are deposited in HathiTrust for Summon. This will enable you to search within the full text of books from our printed collections, where those titles are part of the HathiTrust collection. To try out an example, search Summon for "Virginia Woodhull" or "arnaldia", de-select the default limit to journal articles, and then limit to items in the library catalogue.

3. When we migrate to Serials Solutions, our simplelinks URLs will continue to work as they do now. If you have questions about specific links that are in your webpages, please get in touch with us at onesearch@library.utoronto.ca

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Catalogue records for e-resources
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The updating the e-resource records in our catalogue is now targeted for the weekend of Sept 16-17, as the data required has just been received from Serials Solutions.


Sian Meikle
Sept 7, 2011