Mortensen Electronic Reserves with Blackboard Pilot Process and Technical Overview

A Few Definitions Reserves : The regular, ‘old-fashioned’ material that is stored in the circulation area. Students must physically come to the circulation desk to retrieve the material. The material can only be checked out for a short period, example, for a couple of hours, maximum. Legacy (E-Reserves): This is the Mortensen electronic reserves that has been in place for a number of years. Blackboard (E-Reserves): Users retrieving their electronic reserves from within the Blackboard system. Hard Copies: Printed copies of an article or photocopied pages from a journal or book. Meta-Data: Descriptions of data or the type of data that is being worked with. This includes items like article name, file name, location, date created, etc.

Workflow Process: How a document is placed into Electronic Reserves

Faculty request to have their reserves available for electronic access. Involves Faculty: Submitting a form (Reserve Materials Processing Form) explaining what do with the documents. Contacting Mortensen Circulation Desk (via courier or in person) to drop off the hard copied material. Finding articles and somehow creating a hard copy (photocopying, personal subscription print-out, etc.) ♫ Reserve Materials Processing Form

Faculty choose whether they want their students to access the reserves via the legacy Mortensen E-Reserves or via their Blackboard course. Submitting a form explaining what do with the documents… Reserve Materials Processing Form

Hard copy documents Form is filled for electronic reserves instructions Reserves Coordinator: Digitizes (scans) the pages Saves to a specific folder on the library webserver (Maude) Saves the file as a.pdf Reserve Materials Processing Form

After the actual file has been created and placed in the correct server space… Reserves Coordinator: Opens an MS Access database on the server Inputs meta-data about the document, including professor’s name, name of the.pdf file, article title, more. Chooses the Legacy or Blackboard database table

At this point, the document is available online. Go to e-reserves home Choose a professor Choose a class And view the available electronic documents

Mortensen Viewing this from within Blackboard involves a couple of extra steps. Blackboard

Reserves Coordinator: Opens a web tool called a URL generator Chooses the name and class of a professor to generate the URL/document location Copies and paste the URL into an instruction message that is sent to the professor ♫ To Your electronic reserves are ready. Please use the following URL to paste into Blackboard so your student may access the documents:

Opens up their account on Blackboard Professor: ♫ Copies the URL from the message Chooses the relevant course Goes to the Control Panel, and picks Manage Course Menu from under Course Options Creates a new External Link, adding an Area name of E-Reserves and paste the URL into the Target field

The Mortensen page is now a viewable from within a Blackboard account. Mortensen Electronic Reserves within Blackboard

Technical Process: What goes where in Electronic Reserves

1. Faculty submits both hard copies and a processing form choosing legacy Mortensen e-reserves, or e-reserves from within Blackboard. 2. Reserves Coordinator converts the hard copies to a.pdf and saves it to the library webserver. Process: The Coordinator has a mapped drive that points to the folder on the Maude server (F:\HTML\ERes\Reserves), which is located over in ITS.** \\Maude\Reserves  Reserves on Maude \\ Maude\Reserves \\ Maude\Reserves\Prof 2 \\ Maude\Reserves\Prof 1 \\Maude\Reserves\Prof 1\Class A\\Maude\Reserves\Prof 1\Class B\\Maude\Reserves\Prof 2\Class A\\Maude\Reserves\Prof 2\Class B

\\Maude\Reserves\Prof 1\Class A\\Maude\Reserves\Prof 1\Class B\\Maude\Reserves\Prof 2\Class A\\Maude\Reserves\Prof 2\Class B

1. Faculty submits both hard copies and a processing form choosing legacy Mortensen e-reserves, or e-reserves from within Blackboard. 2. Reserves Coordinator converts the hard copies to a.pdf and saves it to the library webserver. Process: 3. After the file has been saved in the folder, the Coordinator opens an MS Access database to input the meta-data about the file. This is the MortReserves.mdb file located on Maude at F:\HTML\ERes\Databases

1. Faculty submits both hard copies and a processing form choosing legacy Mortensen e-reserves, or e-reserves from within Blackboard. 2. Reserves Coordinator converts the hard copies to a.pdf and saves it to the library webserver. Process: 3. After the file has been saved in the folder, the Coordinator opens an MS Access database to input the meta-data about the file. 4. Technically, the document is now available for viewing online…

The document is now available for viewing online. Active Server Pages (.asp) is the scripting involved in running this system. When users access the e-reserves page, the go to this URL: The eResHome.asp makes a SQL call to the MortReserves.mdb file for information about the faculty and passes this information along the eResSearch.asp page, and so on.

So the process look a little something like this: eResHome.asp eResResultsmort.asp eResSearch.asp MortReserves.mdb This is for the legacy electronic reserves.

For Blackboard, only the equivalent of this last URL is important. The URL generator skips all of the guiding interface steps of the legacy process because Blackboard has its own navigation. All that is needed for linking within Blackboard is the URL, which is then copied from an and pasted into the Target field of a new External Link button. ereserves_results_blackboard.aspeResResultsmort.asp

So what part of Blackboard holds the e-reserves? None. Documents are housed on our servers (Maude). Are made accessible via our scripts (.asp). With our database acting as the go-between (MortReserves.mdb). Blackboard only acts as doorway to this page in the form of a frame within a web browser.