What We Did This Summer

With the Fall semester underway, it's time to get the Allen Library blog back in gear. We took the summer off from blogging, holding onto all of our juicy information until everybody was back and ready to read it. Although it was fairly quiet in here this summer (except for when the summers-only music ed students were here), we were definitely not just sitting idly, waiting for the new semester to start. So here's just a tidbit of what we were up to this Summer:

• We went live with the Hartt Composers Database, a discovery tool for learning about scores we own of works by Hartt faculty composers. It's aimed at chamber works and is easily searchable by instrumentation, so it is very useful if you're looking for something to play. More on this in a future post.
  
  
• If you're an undergraduate student, you might remember taking HLM 020, the class that introduces you to the library and its resources. A good chunk of my summer was spent redesigning that from the ground up. My goal was to make it more user-friendly, more interactive, and, most importantly, more useful. We're halfway through the first assignment out of twelve, and it seems to be going smoothly, so it's been a success so far. Later in the year, I'll be working on working the new tutorials into the regular website.
  
  
• We reached the one year anniversary of Koha, our library catalog. In honor of this, we (Allen and Mortensen Libraries together) completely redesigned the look of the catalog. What used to be plain and generic is now much more visually appealing and unique. You won't find any other library catalog that looks like this!
  
  
• Both seminar rooms now have new whiteboards, both of which have music staves on them! They are much whiter than the old one, and we'll be working hard to keep them that way. We have a huge TV that is going in the large seminar room, so that will be going up sometime this semester. We also have a faster computer in the small seminar room now.
  
  
• In the "good for them, bad for us" category, both Jenny Crum (Public Services Coordinator) and Andrew King (Cataloging Coordinator) decided to leave the Allen Library in order to pursue more performing and teaching. Although it will be difficult to find replacements, we are in the process of doing that right now. I'll let you know when we have some good news.

This is just the tip of the iceberg (sorry for the cliché), but it should give you an idea of what we were up to. Future posts will give some more detail on some of these, and we have some other good blog posts in mind that should be coming soon. I hope everybody had a great summer and I look forward to seeing everybody again in the library!