PALS partners with Northfield’s Bridge Consortium to provide user-friendly search experience for college students

PALS is taking innovative steps to improve the student research experience at Carleton College and St. Olaf College in Northfield, MN with a new overlay for the colleges’ shared library catalog. This fall, PALS signed a contract with the Bridge Consortium to host, customize, and support a VuFind overlay for their library catalog. This new interface makes library collections more visible and attractive to today’s web users while using the consortium’s current underlying Integrated Library System from Innovative Interfaces, Inc. VuFind provides a clean interface with faceted searching and includes social networking features such as tagging and user comments.  

PALS is proud to announce the availability of a mobile site for MnPALS Plus, the customized VuFind-based discovery interface to the library catalogs of the Consortium of MnPALS Libraries. The eagerly anticipated mobile site was received with enthusiasm when screen shots were displayed at the annual User Group meeting in October.

And now it's here! PALS is calling it “+Mobile”

The latest version of PALSconnect ERM, which was installed on production on December 2, includes a version of the Resource List that was designed for use with mobile devices. This will provide patrons who are using mobile devices a view of the Resource List designed to be easily managed on a smaller screen.

If you are not currently a PALSconnect ERM customer and would like to check out the Resource List mobile interface, connect to our ERM sandbox.

Over the Thanksgiving break we completed our annual re-indexing of the Aleph database. There are several ways that re-indexing improves the quality of the MnPALS catalog.

The Aleph production server will be down for a 12 hour window sometime between Thanksgiving Day (Thursday, November 24) and Sunday, November 27 to update indexing tables. We won't know the exact time until the re-indexing on the Aleph development server is complete. We will post a message to the MnPALS-Announce list before taking the system down and again when the system is back up. During this time searches of the library catalog will be available but all other Aleph functionality will be unavailable.