Library IT Out and About

The last six weeks have been a productive period for many staff members in Library IT — they have been traveling to various conferences to hone their craft and learn new skills.

The Preservica Annual Global User Group
April 17 – April 18, 2018, Merton College, Oxford, UK.

Robert Rice, Technical Lead of Enterprise Systems and Infrastructure for Library IT, attended the Preservica Annual Global User Group in Oxford, United Kingdom. Preservica is a digital preservation repository solution for born digital, audio/video content, and digitized content used by the Preservation Department at Yale University Library.

The meeting offered a two-day forum for presentations, workshops, and discussions with other Preservica users and the Preservica team. The focus of the meeting was to discuss the Preservica product vision and the prioritization of future enhancements. Topics covered at the meeting were the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and future release schedules. This year’s event had over 100 international attendees, representing many different countries including the European Union, United Kingdom, and the United States.


The ELUNA 2018 Annual Meeting
May 1 – May 4, Spokane, WA

The Ex Libris Users of North America (ELUNA) holds an annual meeting for the regional user group of Ex Libris in the United States and Canada. Ex Libris is the parent company of Voyager, the library management system currently used by Yale University Library. The ELUNA Annual Meeting hit a new record with 1035 attendees; 650 of the attendees were international Voyager customers, and 530 were Voyager customers from the United States. The main announcement from the meeting was Ex Libris will release the newest enhancements as versions 10.3 and 10.4 instead of Version 11. This renaming of the version allows libraries on Version 9 to continue having support from Ex Libris. Nearly 80 percent of the Voyager community is still using Version 9.
Cindy Greenspun, Chairperson of the Voyager Product Working Group for Ex Libris Users of North America (ELUNA), presented at the ELUNA Conference with Steelsen Smith, Technical Lead in Library IT. Also in attendance was Angela Sidman, Director of E-Resources & Serials Management, who participated in a group panel titled “Talk back: Summon/360 Q&A”.

Next month look for a feature article about Ex Libris news and products from the ELUNA Annual Meeting by Steelsen Smith.


Boston Regional ArchivesSpace Forum 2018
May 3, Boston, MA

The Boston Regional ArchivesSpace Forum was held on May 3 at Tufts University in Boston. Approximately 60 attendees from 22 different institutions convened to speak about completed and ongoing work with their implementations of ArchivesSpace. ArchivesSpace is an open source software platform that supports a wide spectrum of functions, tasks, and workflows within an archival repository.

The ArchivesSpace platform includes a public user interface that is currently undergoing significant development to improve the user experience for researchers, seamless staff workflows, and opportunities for systems integration. As part of the ArchivesSpace Public User Interface (PUI) implementation at Yale University Library, a Usability and Accessibility Workgroup was formed. Eve Neiger, chair of the Usability and Accessibility Workgroup and Processing Archivist at the Beinecke Library, and Tracy MacMath, User Interface Programmer for Library IT, attended and presented at the Forum. Read Tracey MacMath’s article about their presentation. The Forum concluded with a technical workshop on ArchivesSpace plugins.


LYRASIS 2018 Leaders Forums: Experiments in Innovation
May 17, Providence RI,
Fleet Library at the Rhode Island School of Design

The Leaders Forums are small, in-person regional gatherings to discuss problems and explore potential solutions. Experts from the LYRASIS team participate with LYRASIS members in these discussions. The theme of the day was “Innovation and Experimentation in Library Leadership.

Melissa Wisner, Senior Systems Librarian in Library IT, attended and also presented at the LYRASIS 2018 Leaders Forum. Her presentation, “Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution: Reconciling Cost and Value in Our Work” identified measures and methods galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs) could adopt to analyze costs internally and externally. It also discussed steps your organization can take to target and measure the value impact of the work. And how to develop an organizational culture that genuinely supports both innovation and failure.

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