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. 

Getting to Know TS Librarians: Becky Bearden

1. Introduce yourself (name & position). 
My name is Becky Bearden, and I am the Senior Serials & Metadata Librarian at the Fineman and Pappas Law Libraries at Boston University School of Law.

2. Does your job title actually describe what you do? Why/why not?
Overall, yes, but I think if any of us tried to squeeze most of our overarching duties into our title, they would be too long! I am responsible for all things serial-related, in both physical and electronic formats, but many of those responsibilities intersect or rely on collaboration with my colleagues, so we work closely to manage them as a team. The metadata aspect covers many things that are serial related, but this also includes a lot of monographic metadata. The term e-resource management may not be included in the title, but it is a large part of the role as well. 

3. What are you reading right now?
I have a fairly long commute, so I’ve taken up listening to lots of audiobooks on Overdrive. I have pretty eclectic tastes, so currently I have Fierce: How Competing for Myself Changed Everything by Aly Raisman with Blythe Lawrence, as well as A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin. I am also in the middle of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K Rowling at home with my older son, and enjoy a variety of Mo Willems, Bernstein Bears, and Little Critter books with my younger son!

4. If you could work in any library (either a type of library or a specific one), what would it be? Why?
I truly believe I am right where I should be. In general, serials are what I enjoy most about working in a library, and law libraries have a ton of them! Also, this position and institution are still new to me, as I joined BU this past July, and I am really enjoying learning new things, stretching my skills, and using my past experiences in my current role. 

5. You suddenly have a free day at work, what project would you work on?
I’m itching to set up prediction patterns here, since that is something I have been cheerleading since the implementation of ExLIbris’ Alma at my previous institution. This functionality was not available when BU went live in 2012, so they’ve been using the normal receiving functionality for serials receipt.

Cleaning Up Messy Records: Uncovering Match-Points in ILS and Repository Data

Many of us have our hands in multiple pots. Sometimes we are working with repository records, and other times records in our ILS. While embarking on what I mistakenly thought would be a simple series of tasks (linking from 856 fields to our freely accessible, digitized versions of the same items to our IR), I happened to uncover much messier data than expected. What a perfect opportunity to do some house-cleaning! In case you have undertaken similar work, and are considering comparing, cleaning, and (eventually) updating records in multiple locations, here are a few tips and resources I have found helpful on my own journey:

Have good list from the repository. My initial cleanup of Digital Commons items was fairly straight forward. I sat down with our International Law Librarian Anne Burnett to talk about the collection. We batch-downloaded the series as a spreadsheet, and updated the fields that did not match so that they did (example: type was not the same for each, some were articles, some dissertations - this one was easy, updated them all to be "dissertation" type). Then I saved it, and re-uploaded the batch sheet.

Have a good list from the ILS. The same set of items in our library catalog was more difficult to get a solid list of. We are in Innovative's Sierra, so I needed to use "create lists". This time sitting with Associate Director for Collection Services Wendy Moore and I generated a list of items (not bibs). We made several lists, because we quickly discovered that what we thought our control field was (the 502 note) was inconsistent. Catalogers had changed over the many years these records were created, and at a certain point the 502 had changed from having only two periods in this item's abbreviation to having three (ex. LL.M. to L.L.M.). This minor flaw made things a bit more difficult. We ended up instead using the donor note field to get closer to the ideal number of items from my repository list. In the future the location might also be a field to use for pulling this sort of list - but part of the ILS record cleanup was updating location codes, since items had recently been shifted from reserve to the basement. 

Fix your controls so they actually work. I ended up going with the list that had the highest item count (although now I had more than what was in my Digital Commons list) and updating these

records first. Now they will have consistent 502's, and correct item locations. To verify the proper 502, Wendy and I consulted our office copy of the AACR (Anglo-American Cataloging Rules) -

• "Section 2.7 B13 Dissertations". Although LL.M. was not listed as a specific example, the rule states that you use: "Thesis followed by a brief statement of the degree for which the author was a candidate (e.g.. M.A. or Ph.D.), the name of the institution..., and the year in which the degree was granted." 

To do this I used a combination of Global Update in Sierra and manual/individual edits. I added 856 fields to the records as well with subfield u (linking to the Digital Commons series landing page for this collection) and subfield 3 (for the text I wanted to appear as the hyperlink access point). You could do some of this in Rapid Update as well, if you're feeling extra confident! - Note: In Sierra I had to start with a list of item records, but at a certain point I had to re-run my partially cleaned-up list to create a new list of bib records. I could only globally update fields in the bib record with a list of bibs (a list of items would not work!). 

Export a better list from the ILS. Now that I had a proper list from Sierra, I exported it to a text delimited file, then imported it into an Excel spreadsheet. I was ready to compare it to my repository spreadsheet and figure out what what missing in Digital Commons.To figure this out, I started by doing a "save as" of each spreadsheet, then narrowing both sets of data down to only the fields that I could use to compare between the two: Title, Author, and Publication Date (year was really what I was looking for). This presented further problems - not all titles in Digital Commons looked like what should be matching titles from the ILS records (ex. many repository title fields had been entered in all caps!). For Author, Digital Commons separated last and first name fields, but in the MARC records this was a single field. For Publication, the formatted date in Digital Commons records was very detailed and specific, while the only match-point in the ILS records was the 260 field (included publication date at the end as the subfield $c) - major thanks to our Collection Services Manager David Rutland for knowing this one off the top of his head! The 502 might again prove useful if the 260's were too difficult (since the "year in which the degree was granted" appeared at the end of this field for each item).

MarcEdit, OpenRefine, and beyond. At this point in my process of this particular project I am playing around with a combination of editing in MarcEdit, as well as a number of tricks I am reading up on for OpenRefine cleanup. If you are totally new to OpenRefine, there is a really handy wiki with screencast intros that I appreciated before diving in. So far, an extremely helpful resource I have come across has been Comparing Two Sets of Data in OpenRefine How-To. This entry shares step by step how to "Normalise titles to do comparison" using three main transformations. For my particular set of data, the value.fingerprint transform has given me good results, removing case from both sets of titles:

There is also an excellent page with more information specific to working with and cleaning up dates. I am still working with the cleanup of this set of items, but even though it is a work in progress this has been a wonderful learning experience. Each time I work on it I learn something new! I am excited about the things I have figured out in this process that can be applied to other sets of items in both our repository and library catalog records in the future. I'd like to thank several of my colleagues at UGA Law Library for providing various pieces of this project's puzzle. Without them I would not have made it this far with these particular data sets. Thank you Anne, David, and Wendy for all your context, tips, tricks, and sharing your experiences with this collection.

What types of cleanup are you doing with your library's data? What tips and resources have worked well for you? Please share with us in the comments! 

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.

Here Come the Bots: Six Tips When Designing Your IR's Metadata for Improved Discoverability

Last week I attended a webinar about "the science of discoverability". Although it was aimed at librarians working with institutional repository (IR) content, it was an excellent reminder that the many best practices I followed as a web developer for our law school's Drupal site were applicable not only with repositories but also with LibGuides (and any other pages we wanted Google to find). Here are six tips to deploy when designing metadata for the bots and increasing your site's discovery:

1. Title Fields Are Important! In fact they are perhaps the most important field of any object or event metadata in your repository. Working as a web developer this was something we struggled with when other users would create webpages. The title did not always match or identify the content. Later on they inevitably call or email to ask why it isn't showing in Google's search results when they put in keywords that they think and assume will definitely retrieve their exact webpage that was literally just created - of course it doesn't work. Almost always the keywords they wanted Google to identify were not in their page title field (or URL). The same rings true for IR content. No matter how many other fields have the data or keywords, if the title doesn't it probably isn't good enough to be retrieved by Google (unless you have big bucks of course - then you can use Adwords to pay your way to the top of that results list as a sponsored item...but I doubt any of us have that kind of money for SEO, hah!).


2. HUMAN-Readable Is Better. This is not your library catalog. Your ILS is a (mostly) closed-off system. It was engineered by ONLY librarians who have strict cataloging rules passed down over decades of meticulous fine-tuning with a field for literally every-single-possible-bit of data. IR's are not an ILS. In the same way Google is not your OPAC. They do not and will never function the same way. Sure, you can use some of the same operators, and you may even form similar strings in each of the search bars. The difference is that Google's algorithm is not a 100% known entity. Most of Google's users are performing natural language searches. Your I.T. or metadata librarian's cannot get into Google's back-end and tell it what you want, what fields to provide searches for, what weight to give certain types of results, or how to display your results list. Google's algorithm not only likes but craves HUMAN-readable, NOT machine-readable. Craft the content in your fields for any given item, event, or landing page with this in mind. You really should design the data carefully. And the key here is not to overdo it! 


3. Don't Use Too Many Keywords. This relates to the last sentence of the last tip - don't overdo it. In addition to not getting overly wordy or technical in your fields, the field to especially watch out for is keywords. In Digital Commons there is a nice keyword field. When I first started adding content to our repository I no doubt went overboard with more keywords than I should have. Although too few could hinder discoverability, if the keywords are on point and you have two to four of them that are appropriate you will hit a sweet spot with Google's crawl. But beware of using too many. Google and other search engines will actually ping or potentially ignore your content (and in some cases as the webinar warned your entire site) for using too many keywords. Excessive metadata makes it assume this content isn't valid. So just be careful here. This doesn't mean you should never use more than four keywords. There may be occasions when less just won't cut it. Perhaps that one article or conference you just loaded is particularly interdisciplinary and really needs more terms. Keeping the majority of your content with three keywords or less will get search engines to take you more seriously and those few instances where you decided to use more keywords won't throw up red flags like twelve keywords for every single items in your repository would. 


4. Frequency, Consistency & Longevity. I can't count how often I was asked as a web developer when Google would crawl our site. This is a mystery to most everyone, and while you can request through some of Google's Webmaster Tools for a re-crawl there is no guarantee the speed at which that will happen. One thing is for sure, you will be re-crawled more often the more frequently and consistently you update any site, no matter what site it is. Long periods of no activity may result in flagging you as a dead site so regular adding or refreshing of content is the key here. Another related factor is longevity. This is simply the idea that the longer a site exists the more time it has had to be crawled, to appear in search results, and as a result to increase site traffic. Then the cycle returns to the beginning since the more site visits you receive from organic Google searches the more your site should rise in the results list as your site and its content becomes more closely associated with a variety of searches over time. Obviously a brand new site will take time to get there, but after many repeats of this cycle (with the help of your frequent and consistent care and feeding) this will happen naturally. 


5. Bots Like Quick Load Times. So since we don't really know when Google or other search engine bots will pay us a visit, how can we make sure that when they do they are finding us at our best? Load times are one big indicator. I know, I know... but there are SO many cool and flashy things we could embed into our content, right? Is that snazzy High-Res image of the latest guest lecturer too much for Google? What about our Issuu flipbooks of scanned symposia programs, or the YouTube video of the three hour panel? Each bit of multimedia needs a different approach here. If your IR system has native streaming this will help cut down on additionally embedded load times. If not, you may need to choose what is more important - the load time or the media keeping your traffic on your site. If traffic isn't a major factor, load times will increase by hyperlinking to the media instead of placing it on the page itself. The same could be true for embedded flip-book style PDFs. For images, as long as you use best practices for the proper resolution on the web you should not have to choose between a crisp, quality image and fast load times. Use the right format for image and other media files (choose MP3's for online streaming instead of WAVs of AIFFs). If you want or need to offer the highest quality original files to site visitors, hyperlink to that file's location instead of providing at their point of entry. This will keep load times up and still give visitors the option of access and retrieval. In the end, the faster your content loads, the more quickly it can be indexed. Bots are impatient - they are bots! Make them wait too long and they just keep moving. 


6. Site Maps Are Critical, Especially for "Dead" Collections. So your content is now in tip-top shape! It has excellent human-readable title fields and abstracts. It has good keywords, but not too many of them. You've even managed to build a beautiful page of content enhanced with multi-media, but you've been careful to follow best practices for these files and your load time is great. Now there is just one problem - this collection is an archive! It just so happens as a librarian you have created a collection of items that will never grow again because it is historical. How can you possibly be frequent and consistent with this set of data? Will Google eventually forget about you (even if the collection exists over a long period of time) because there is nothing to update? No! Not necessarily - this is where your site's skeleton, the trusty site map, comes into play. Depending on the system you are using a site map may be generated for you as you create new content. It never hurts to revisit this though. Particularly for sites that have been around over a long period of time, the site map (generated for you or created by someone else) may be pulling titles and other structural and organizational information that is either no longer accurate or appropriate, or perhaps it is just not as good as it should be. Revisit your site map every so often as a regular maintenance task. It is essentially an outline of your site and all that it contains, and as such can indicate where a collection or series title is not descriptive enough, is too descriptive, or is just not human-readable. Think back to tip #1 and #2 for human-readable fields (especially titles). Page summaries can help here as well. When you conduct a Google search, if a result appeared but had no description at all for the page are you going to take your chances with clicking through to that result, or are you more likely to choose the result that tells you what you will find there? Make titles, related page summaries for what it is about, and if possible even URL strings make sense and describe what you will find there. Adjust your sitemap and related descriptive data as needed, and monitor how your site (hopefully) rises in results over time, as well as how your traffic (hopefully) increases over time. 

Have more tips to share with TechScans readers that were not touched on here? What has worked for improving your website or repository's metadata, and how do you optimize your content for search engines? Share with us in the comments! 

Getting to Know TS Librarians: Joy Humphrey

1. Introduce yourself.
My name is Joy Humphrey, and I'm the Associate Director of the Harnish Law Library at Pepperdine University's Rick J. Caruso School of Law. 

2.Does your job title actually describe what you do? Why/why not?
My job title is broad, so in that sense, it does describe what I do because I'm a bit of a generalist.  At any given moment I can be fielding a question about our noise policy, originally cataloging a board game, or contacting a vendor to pay an invoice. I'm tasked with overseeing the day-to-day operations of the law library, but I am specifically over the Public Services and the Technical Services Departments.

3.What are you reading right now?
I'm on a Ruth Reichl kick right now. I recently finished Save Me the Plums, Reichl's memoir of her time as the editor of Gourmet, then I moved onto her earlier memoir Tender at the Bone, and I'm currently reading the sequel, Comfort Me with Apples. I love food memoirs, especially at this time of year since they get me pumped to do all that Thanksgiving cooking.

4.If you could work in any library (either a type of library or a specific one), what would it be? Why?
I would love to work in an art museum library.  As someone who makes a point of visiting art museums in every city she travels to, actually working in one would be divine. (I expect the reality would not match my fantasy--budgets are probably small, art books are unwieldy and heavy--but at least the collection would be beautiful.)

5.You suddenly have a free day at work, what project would you work on?
I know this sounds prosaic, but I would clean my office. I mean, REALLY clean it. Go through every file, every drawer, every book shelf. I would Marie Kondo the heck out of it. Because clearing out all that is irrelevant is the best way to bring a fresh perspective to what one does every day.