Welcome to ERES (Electronic Reserves).
This document is hoped to be a quick aid to you in creating and managing your own ERES courses.
The first page all users of ERES encounter is the Home page http://eres.snow.edu .
From this page students can get access to the courses their instructors or the library have prepared for them. To access your faculty account, find the “Admin Functions” link on the right of the home page.
You will be presented with a login screen. Enter the username and password provided and click the “Login” button.
After successfully logging in you’ll see this page which is a list of the links to the courses you are able to manage as well as link that will allow you to “Create a new course.”
To manage a course, (add, delete, or modify documents, add or remove links, reorder the appearance of items…) simply click on the course desired. And the next web page appears. As you can see there are many functions available to us. The most common function we use is “Add a document or link”. But you can see that we could also provide some organization to the course page by adding folders. And once we have items on a course page we could also “Remove a document or link”, or “Modify a document or link”, “Change the Order of documents.” You will also note some Utility functions that we will not go into at this time, and some Setup functions that will allow you to delete or modify the course page and information about the page such as the course password and who can manage the page.
For now let’s pursue adding material to the course page. We do this by clicking on “Add a document or link.”
This page gives us the options to add a document, a web link, create a reference to a “Hard Copy” reserve ( a book, video, paper copy some physical item being held at the library for your students), create and add a document right now that doesn’t need to be uploaded, and creating a link to an item that already exists in ERES but on another course page.
Click “Add a file-based document.”
The main function we use on this page is the link “Transfer File(s).” This gives us a vehicle or process by which we can upload files from our local computer to the ERES server.
Click on the “Transfer File(s)” link.
This is the “File Transfer” screen. Click on the “Browse…” button and navigate to the file wanted for uploading.
In this case I selected the Adobe acrobat document “Circulatory System Study Aides.pdf.” Click the “Open” button next.
We are returned to the “File Transfer” window. Click the “Transfer” button and the file is uploaded to the ERES server, and made available for the next step. Repeat the Browse/Transfer process for all the files you want to upload at the time. Click “Done” when your are finished transferring files.
After the transfer process is complete we are returned to the “Add Document” page. Click “Continue” to proceed to the next step in adding a document to a course page.
This page displays a list of the files just transferred from the local computer to the ERES server. These documents a held in this space until each in turn is selected and associated with a course page’s document entry. Select the document to be processed and click the “Continue” button.
This page associates the document we selected with a link on the course page as well as give ERES some more information about how to deal with the document.
Enter a title for the document. This is the label you want students to see on the course page in other word the text of the link they will see. The title does not have to be anything like the actual file name of the document. As a side note, documents can be listed on the course page alphabetically by title, so you can provide some structure to a list of links by naming accordingly.
A password can be added for each individual document. We at the library do not tend to use this function.
Enter the number of pages in the document.
FYI: There is some information given about the size of the file that was uploaded to ERES and estimates on how long it will take using various connection types to download.
Sometimes documents that have been scanned in may get quite large. A smaller file size can be achieved using a lower resolution when scanning. The best results of course come from a document that is already in electronic format; Word, Excel, WordPerfect, HTML etc. These formats are quite easy to convert to a pdf file format that is many times smaller the scanned version.
Click the “Continue” button when you have the title and page number fields filled.
Congratulations a link to the document has been added to the course page. From here you can add or modify another document or apply a feature to the link just created that makes the link appear on the web site only for a specific time window. This also is a feature we don’t often use at the library. At the lower part of the web page you will note links we can navigate to from here. Selecting the course page link will show us what the actual student view of the page is. The Course Page Management link will return us to the web page that gives all the various functions that can be performed on the course page.
Click on the Course Page link.
Click “Accept” after entering the password.
Here is the Course page. A student clicks on the desired link and the document is viewed on their local computer.
If you find something is not right about the page you can click the “Page Management” link on the right and it will take you to the page management functions page. If the user is not already logged in then they are asked for a ID and password before they can get to the page management screen.
Again from here you can modify the course page. You can also end your session by clicking the “logout” link, which we recommend for you course page security.
If at any time you need help from the library do not hesitate to call us.
Scott Pratt
283-7360