Tuesday, 12 July 2011

OpenAthens

Middlesbrough College hosted an OpenAthens Administrator training day today which was very interesting. I have been the administrator for the 5 years I've worked there and have had little training on what it can do. I get by, everything works and I'm able to solve problems (usually relating to forgotten login details) but each time I look on the administrator portal, I see lots of options and I don't know what they do. I have tentatively played around with some of it but with live data involved i'm reluctant especially since last year I accidentally deleted all the staff accounts - Eduserv got my data back thankfully. 


Today was my chance to see what can be done and I wasn't disappointed. The trainer was the very enthusiastic 'Awesome Andy' complete with a Superman belt buckle. What did I learn then? Well loads really and the most important for me are:
  • I understand more about the permission sets and have finally changed the annoying LRC_User permission set to a straight forward Staff. I didn't know whether the change would effect the bulk uploads but it doesn't.
  • I've hopefully created a Staff user group, to keep the staff accounts even more separate from the student ones. I'm not going to unintentionally delete them this year.
  • I'm going to look into adding more panels, maybe a one for RSS feeds and definitely a one for opening times. I have played with the panel editor before with limited success, I partly achieved what I set out to do. The panels I wanted to show - did (Edina and Mimas), the anticipated increase in use of databases they provide didn't. I think because they weren't on the main resources list, so in response i've added them to it now. That was something I only found out I could do 2 weeks ago and an area that is likely to expand over the summer, as i'm going to try adding some of the e-journals we get, that aren't available elsewhere.

All in all, I had a good day, have lots of ideas, some that i've already started to work on and others that need to be added to my ever growing summer jobs list.

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