The Ares Electronic Reserves System is designed to automate library reserve services and provide fast effective use for faculty, students and reserve staff. Ares provides around-the-clock access to your reserves collection and saves time for your faculty members and library staff.
The following make up the Ares system.
Ares Web Interface
The Web Interface is used by Faculty and student users of Ares to access classes and the associated Reserve items. Only faculty users and their "proxy" users have the ability to add new classes and Reserves items to the system.
Click for more on Web Interface - Instructors or Web Interface - Students
Ares Administration Suite
This web based Administrator's tool give the Ares administrator the ability to add Reserves staff (those who will use the Ares client) to the Ares system. The Administration Suite also contains all of the customization settings available in Ares.
Click for more on Ares Administration Suite
Ares Client
The Ares Client is loaded to the Reserves staff workstations and is used by them to:
assist faculty in creating classes and reserves items (if the faculty member is unable or unwilling to do it themselves)
post items that have been retrieved from the stacks or otherwise acquired for the faculty member.
review items that might need checked for content or format issues.
Click for more on Ares Client
Ares Reports
Ares reports give you important information about the use of your system.
Reserve items by Instructor
Reserve items by Department
Overall Usage by Month
Items awaiting CCC ordering
Course Copyright Costs
Ares has the following features:
Customizable Web Pages
The Ares Web pages use a template-based system allowing Libraries to markup the standard HTML web pages based on needs or university branding.
OpenURL
The OpenURL feature allows teaching faculty to submit requests for electronic reserve materials via the library's local catalog.
Z39.50
Ares has a built-in Z39.50 interface to make searching for library owned material easier. Reserve desk staff can easily search the catalog, import shelving location and call number information and then print pull slips to retrieve materials.
Copyright Clearance
Ares allows for different methods of Copyright Clearance. To help you keep track of items reserve staff can make notations if copyright is required or if copyright has already been obtained. Additionally, Atlas Systems has partnered with the Copyright Clearance Center so that Libraries can easily secure copyright permissions for their electronic reserves materials.
Notification of new materials for Students
To provide an additional service to your campus community, Ares can provide alerts to students when new materials have been added for a specific course. There are two methods to ensure students will always know about new material.
Email Alerts - When a new item is processed and posted for availability, users who have elected to receive alerts will receive email directly to their inbox.
RSS feeds - Each course has a unique RSS feed that student may subscribe to through their favorite news reader such as Bloglines or Newsgator
Freedom of Format
Ares allows for any type of file format to be added into the system ranging from Microsoft office documents to mp3 files. Library staff has ultimate control over which type of files they will allow on their system.
Access Control
To ensure that only authorized users have access to reserve items, Ares has 3 possible access control options.
You can choose to have
no restrictions
limit access via a class password
limit access via student id numbers
System Authentication
User accounts are required to provide all of Ares specialized features. To secure user accounts Ares allows for authentication through:
a standard Ares login using a secure hashed password
LDAP
III Patron Authentication module
...and many more such as Cosign and Pubcookie.
User Hot Lists
The user hot list allows students to have their favorite reserve materials just a click away. The hot list uses a familiar and easy shopping-cart style method of adding and removing individual items.
Usage Tracking
Usage tracking allows library staff and course instructors to see which reserve materials are being used most. Reserve staff has the option of capturing anonymous statistics or detailed usage data that will show which user accessed a particular item.
TWAIN Compliant
After finding material, library staff can scan directly into Ares using any TWAIN compliant scanner. All Ares initiated scans are converted into Adobe Acrobat PDF files.