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.

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. 

Ex Libris Acquires Innovative

The library services platform market continues to shrink with the December 5th announcement that Ex Libris has acquired Innovative. Innovative has long been a major player in the ILS/LSP arena but in recent years has seen a number of its academic customers migrate to Ex Libris products or other systems. Many public libraries remain Innovative customers and this acquisition gives Ex Libris a foothold in that market. Library Technology Guides show that Ex Libris' next-generation platform, Alma, is currently in use in only 6 public libraries. Sierra, Innovative's most current product is in use at 1383 public libraries. The Polaris platform, which Innovative acquired several years ago, is still in use at 1355 public libraries.  While Ex Libris will benefit in gaining customers among public libraries, Innovative, on the other hand, will no doubt stand to benefit from Ex Libris' cloud technology infrastructure and greater pool of development resources.

According to the the FAQ on the acquisition, Innovative will continue to operate as a separate business unit within Ex Libris. There will be no immediate changes to Innovative's management structure, product lineup and technical support system, including third-party integrations with other systems. While current Innovative customers may eventually see the benefits of Ex Libris development resources, ultimately this acquisition means less real choice in the LSP/ILS marketplace. Libraries looking for a new system to support changing needs will have fewer options from which to choose.