Power Projects for Quarantined Librarians

Some of us are approaching the two month mark of our library's closure to the public. Though it has definitely had ups and downs, I have found it has helped me better carve out time for professional development activities, dedicate more of my day to clean-up projects I have just not had time to follow through on, and even start new projects with the help of colleagues who found themselves needing a little more to do from home. On the heels of Travis' post about transitioning technical services staff to working from home, I hope this post will elaborate on that topic to give specific project examples for those working in collection services, technical services, or metadata and archives related positions.

ILS Database Maintenance
Projects of this nature could range from starting, continuing or finishing the cleanup of small or large sets of records.

• Complete outstanding cleanup projects a for smaller sets of records. For me, a cleanup I started last fall (LL.M. Theses Collection) which I previously blogged about was the first on the chopping block.
• Facilitate the cleanup of collections, like course reserves, for other departments. Our role was simply to assist by creating lists, then formatting those in Excel. Access services staff can use that list to check for faculty members no longer with our institution, and then remove the instructor and those related reserve item records from the ILS.
• Learn more about your system and the tools you can use to better care for it. There is no shortage of webinars right now. In addition to system specific sessions, there are many free sessions focusing on record management or data tools. Some of my favorites have been Terry Reese's "MarcEdit Shelter-In-Place Webinars". The latest one, number 6, is on regular expressions.

IR Micro & Macro Clean-up
Repositories like our own in Digital Commons have issues similar to those inherent to long-standing ILS's: without regular care and feeding, the structure becomes less organized and the data for records less consistent.

• Review your repository site map and make big picture structural adjustments. Our IR has been around since 2006, and many of our earlier events (like conferences and symposium) were added before we adopted using the event types. As a result, all "events" before a certain date were actually article-type records, and all of the "events" after that certain date had completely different series structures as well as different metadata fields. To resolve this some time was spent almost manually moving the articles over, one by one, to give them the appropriate fields in their new home. It has taken lots of effort, but in the end it will make all the difference in the discoverability of events of the same series. For more info on this topic, see a previous blog post about IR Metadata.
• Harvest digital media to expand your individual item content. Similar to the LL.M. Theses collection cleanup mentioned above, last fall another colleague and I began a collaborative project to use scripts to capture all of the metadata and publicly hosted digital-born image files from our law school website into spreadsheets of data. Using these spreadsheets after a little minor formatting of the cells I can now batch load the images pretty quickly. Though this work is still in progress, it has been a perfect project for both my colleague and I to tele-work on since the repository and the website are each accessible from home.
• Learn more about your system. The BrightTalk Digital Commons sessions have been wonderful to watch both live and recorded versions of (learning more about native streaming has really come in handy!), and many of the past CALICon sessions which are all freely available as videos online have also been great sources of learning how others are using repositories and what else we can do with our own IR.

Cataloging Collections & Archives 
Be it physical items, special collections, or virtual equivalents, the building being closed has not stopped the number of items that need our attention. Even without new items, existing items can always use accessibility makeovers!

• Archive virtual events. As we all know, although some events have been cancelled completely due to closures, most have opted to go virtual in one way or another. At our law school, faculty colloquium have continued occurring in Zoom, and even a conference was hosted entirely online (with more attendance than our physical space could have accommodated). I have continued collecting materials for archiving these events both for when I return to add to the physical special collections, and to add them as I normally would to our repository "conferences" series. In the absence of printed programs, I have saved PDF "prints" of email programs, and instead of photographs of the room or panelists in real life, I have taken screen captures of Zoom rooms at the highest quality my computer will allow.

Thumbs of 15 photos of book spines for a colleague.

• Catalog items from home. I did not have too many outstanding items to catalog when I left the office to set up my home workspace. The items that I did have, I brought with me in a small box. Most ILS have a web-browser accessible entry point, and although I cannot complete all of my tasks from home (like data exchange) I can still catalog! I was able to catch up on a few items this way, and honestly spend more time doing detailed original cataloging that I might have rushed through in the office. As one of the essential employees (those physical backup tapes don't change themselves!) I have been able to grab a couple more items as needed on my brief but weekly run into the office. For those colleagues not coming into the office at all, I've taken photographs of items to share with them so they can continue their work from home, even without the items in hand.
• Make items more accessible. This could take lots of forms. One project we are excited is finally underway is the OCR-ing of hundreds of already digitized documents. The PDFs were not text-searchable, but thanks to one staff member and a couple of librarians we have created a very effective workflow and are making great progress to provide more accessibility and in turn discoverability to archival collections like student directories, law school magazines, and historical strategic plans. Transcription is another option if you have more audio or video content. It can be tedious but the effort goes a long way to making items available to a wider audience online. Marketing your collections and archives is another way to share them with the world. Blog for your library about physical items to help patrons or the public feel more at home, even from a distance. In doing so I've used it as an opportunity to get to know our archives better. Advertise your digitally available collections through organizations at the state, regional or national level. Everyone is searching for free educational content right now, so share what you have to offer. Many org's have made calls for this type of content to spotlight, and others will probably thank you for sending ideas their way. 

Using Adobe Acrobat Pro on Law School issued laptops, collection services staff could batch enhance scans and perform optical character recognition (OCR) to make PDFs text-searchable.

 
Professional Growth & Contributions
If you are still finding yourself, your colleagues or supervisee's lacking things to do, sign up for a course, attend a webcast, document your projects and turn them into articles or presentations.

• There is no end to organizations sharing webinars online right now. Even if you cannot fit all of the live events into your teleworking schedule (for some reason many of them have taken place at the same time, and in the same platforms!) you can still register for them to receive access to recording links later. In addition to the links I shared above, I've also really enjoyed the two courses I took over the last two weeks from Midwest Collaborative for Library Services. It never hurts to refresh your memory of certain topics that you might not have had dedicated attention to give since library school, or to learn something brand new! 
• Document everything. Each time I begin to make progress on a new special project, or fine tune a workflow at my institution, I approach documentation as if I were going to present it later as a conference session, workshop, or article. With many conferences announcing they are going virtual, it has never been a better time to submit proposals without the hesitation of travel logistics. If you have never published before, now may be the time to share how you did that certain something with a journal or in your organization or SIS newsletter. The opportunities are limitless, so keep that in mind no matter what projects you are undertaking. 

Transitioning Technical Services Staff to Working from Home

The sudden COVID-19 outbreak necessitated a quick transition to working from home for many institutions, including my own. With some public services, such as reference, instruction, and electronic document delivery, it's not hard to imagine how to do that work from another location. However, a lot of Technical Services work requires handling physical items. Below is brief outline of how I transitioned my Technical Services staff to working from home.

As the outbreak spread internationally, the University asked for all colleges and departments to update their Continuity of Operations Plans (COOP). Our Dean's office at the College of Law asked all supervisors to test having staff work from home to identify any technological and procedural roadblocks. In the case of my department, the staff member whose work was most suited to being done from home was the Acquisitions Specialist. I wanted that person to be the first test of working from home. Immediately, though, issues were identified. This staff person had neither hardware nor internet service at home with which she could perform her job.

On the other hand, the rest of the staff had good technological infrastructure at home but perform tasks that are less easy to transfer off-site as they handle physical materials. In their cases, I worked with them to identify projects they could work on from home. My other three direct reports came up with the following projects:

• Serials Specialist - Locating and correcting poorly formatted 852 fields and other garbled holdings information that was still outstanding from our system migration in 2018
• Cataloging Specialist - Original cataloging of theses and dissertations; focusing on re-cataloging and reclassification projects; cleaning up other data migration issues 
• Special Collections - Reorganizing photos of College events; research requests; working on publications and other professional development goals. 

The acquisitions staff person was loaned a laptop from the Public Services department. However, it needed various upgrades and administrative changes before it could function from the staff person's home. Additionally, the College purchased mobile wifi hotspots with unlimited data plans for staff to use. I was able to get one of those and set it up pretty easily. College IT staff upgraded the laptop and installed VPN software that allowed access to the University's financial systems. 

The directive to begin working from home came more quickly than anticipated. Everyone but the acquisitions staff person was able to begin working from home almost immediately, although they did make brief trips to the office to pick up items needed for their projects. The acquisitions staff person, who I had thought would be the first to begin working from home, ended up being the last one able to do so. Thankfully, it was only about a day later when all the technological issues were resolved. 

Since working from home, I check in with each of my direct reports via email at least once a day. I have asked them to send me daily summaries of their activities at the end of their work days. And I send out an all-staff message wrapping up at the end of my day. We have also transitioned our staff meeting to Zoom. At the request of our Dean, I have made these meetings weekly instead of monthly. I have also identified webinars and other activities the staff can view from home. 

Despite the sudden transition and the ever-changing situation, my Technical Services staff has adapted well to working at home. Once technological issues were addressed and projects identified, we quickly realized that Technical Services work is as adaptable to a work from home situation as other library services.