September 17, 2012

As you know, OSLIS is a K12 website with three main features: information literacy resources; access to the statewide databases for Oregon K12 students and educators; and Citation Maker, a citation generator in MLA and APA formats. Also as you know, because of intermittent access issues that could not be resolved, and on the advice of outside experts, last fall we pulled down OSLIS and coordinated efforts to rebuild the site. For about the last nine months, OSLIS Lite was up instead, but it could only provide access to some OSLIS resources, not all of them. After much work and testing, the rebuilt version of OSLIS went live in mid-July. Since going live, the site has been stable and access has been constant.

Note that the rebuilt OSLIS is the same as the former fuller site except that it no longer has the My Stuff folder. That was a virtual space to store work related to a current research project, and we did not pay to rebuild the feature because there are now many free cloud applications, like Google docs, that serve the same purpose and do even more.

If you run into any problems on the rebuilt site, please report them. The best way to do that is to use the feedback link found in the header at the top of all OSLIS pages. By being on the problem page when you click on Feedback, the URL of the page will be included in the email that I receive. That will be very helpful.

If you changed your OSLIS bookmarks while OSLIS Lite was up, be sure to change them back. While OSLIS Lite had “cm” in the URL, the URLs for the rebuilt OSLIS do not. Please check that the OSLIS links on your district, school, and library websites work. I recommend being very specific with bookmarks. For example, if you are in an elementary school, why bookmark the generic www.oslis.org when you can lead your students directly to the elementary landing page by bookmarking http://elementary.oslis.org/? Or, if you want to highlight the databases in a secondary school, bookmark http://secondary.oslis.org/find-information to save clicks.

Here’s to a great year for you, your students, and OSLIS!

Thanks,
Jen

Jennifer Maurer
School Library Consultant
Oregon State Library
250 Winter Street NE
Salem, OR 97301
503.378.5011
jennifer.maurer@state.or.us