From Cancellations to Coding: Pandemic-Centered Tech Topics on Day Two of the OBS/TS Summit 2020

So far, day two of the summit has delivered fantastic programming. I wish I could attend it all! The final virtual event takes place at 6 PM EST tonight. This morning my two favorite sessions both dealt with the new realities we are living in post COVID-19 closures, touching on this from the perspective of budget cuts to work from home workarounds. Here were my takeaways:

Top Left to Bottom Right: Gilda Chiu-Ousland, Wendy Moore, Heather Buckwalkter, Anne Lawless-Collins.

TS Resource Management Roundtable: Budget Cuts & Collecting Pivots
I was really on the fence about which of the earliest morning sessions to attend, and I am so glad I selected this one on resource management and collecting pivots. Wendy Moore from the University of Georgia Law Library led the discussion with a powerful statement that really summarizes the entire roundtable and the timeliness of the topics:

"Crisis can lead to LOTS of creativity."

What followed were introductions from each of the panelists including Heather Buckwalter, Gilda Chiu-Ousland, and Anna Lawless-Collins. Each shared the state of things at their institution, the fallout from COVID-19 closures including the stopping of shipments and the addition of online study aids and other e-resources to help students and faculty get through a quick pivot to virtual learning, and the budget (if they had %'s or figures yet) that they are each facing for fiscal year 2021 and 2022. This session (as with several from day one of the summit) was not recorded to allow attendees to feel more comfortable sharing the details and situations of their library, law school, or larger institution. Two polls were executed in the larger Zoom room before dividing into smaller groups for more personalized and in depth discussions. The polls were very interesting, revealing many of us still do not know our budget, or have vague %'s that are yet to be approved, and that the majority of us are cutting print journals more than any other area of our collections.


In the smaller groups, attendees were better able to share their own situations, including some very creative strategies for how to negotiate with vendors, what data they are using to make those decisions about what and how to cut items from the collection, and what they have already or are planning to cancel to meet the demands of the coming fiscal year. There was a big focus on mitigating expectations of faculty and other stakeholders, and many were open about having these difficult conversations with their faculty members related to monograph acquisitions and with their institutions related to print course reserve materials. Overall an excellent program that was really open to sharing their situations so we can all learn from one another and continue best serving our library users.

Hot Topic: Technologies We Use

Presented by Jesse Lambertson, this session was more of an open discussion than a straight-forward presentation. Sharing his own library system as the beginning example, Lambertson pitched questions to the audience with lively responses in real time and invited members to un-mute and speak to their specific system challenges in the work from home environment. It was really interesting to hear individuals sharing the pros and cons of their various integrated library system platforms once they were catapulted into teleworking. The clear up-side to having a web-based interface was the ease that these librarians and their staff could quickly pivot to working from home without the hassle of using VPN or requiring remote desktop. These included those using TIND and Alma to name a couple. Several of us still working with iii's Sierra were able to join in chorus about our struggles in working from home with spotty VPN support and the differences in Sierra web as compared to the desktop client.

Presenter Jesse Lambertson screen shares Python script snippets hack for working with CSV data.

For importing and exporting records, both individually or in batches, many hacks were shared including creative ways use Marc Edit when working from home and the potential for more API's between Marc Edit and the ILS. It is of course that time of year when we are all gathering statistics. With much overlap from the previous session I attended, many of us commented we are accessing collection and user data much more right now to better inform decision making in a time of budget cuts. As a result, further roadblocks and workflow workarounds were discussed for various systems. Several attendees shared how they query their system for cataloging and other statistics, the issues they experience in the format of the data they pull out, and the obstacles that come with trying to do this type of work from home or with very limited access to the library. Many individuals (myself included!) are periodically retrieving data from their systems, exporting it at txt or csv files, and then taking it home on laptops of flash drives to be able to spend more time with it when teleworking. However, and few shared more innovative approaches to both massaging data as well as collecting and sharing it. Lambertson shared a highly creative approach using Python scripts to automate certain aspects of the csv to Excel conversion of his data. Another attendee shared their library's customized Google Sheets dashboard which pulls data from the ILS into the same location as reference transactions statistics (populated by Google Form responses). A truly fantastic session with lots of open dialogue between attendees. I am so glad I attended and I can't wait to see and hear how the experiential system and data approaches our members are working with now unfold in the coming months and years as access to our offices and systems remains largely unknown during a pandemic.