Category: Enterprise Systems and Services

SearchFest! sessions for October and November

Jenn Nolte

There will be two more SearchFest! sessions scheduled for the fall semester.

The goals of SearchFest!:

  • test out existing Orbis or Morris search strategies in our new unified discovery interface, Quicksearch.
  • demonstrate the features and functionality that are unique to Quicksearch
  • review the timeline for Quicksearch’s transition to production in January 2016
  • answer any questions from staff about how to use Quicksearch in either instruction or daily work

As with the first SearchFest!, there will also be pizza served at the beginning of each session.

To register for the October 8th session, click here.

To register for the November 17th session, click here.

See you at SearchFest!

YUL gets an updated interface for digital collections search and discovery

Jenn Nolte

On Monday 9/21/2015, YUL’s digital collection discovery interface (findit.library.yale.edu) will go live with a new design modeled on the Quicksearch interface design. These coordinating designs let our users know that they are in the same Yale University Library web space and should expect similar functionality.

The new look and feel of digital collections search at YUL- main page (click the image to get a larger view):

Digital Collections Search look and feel

 

Search results in the new design:

Digital Collections Search look and feel - search results

 

There will also be a few new features in the digital collections search added on Monday. These include:

 

  • an Access Restrictions facet, to limit by either open or restricted accessNew feature: Access facet
  • a Repository facet, to limit to and search within a specific repository at YUL

New feature added: Repository facet

  • a Call Number facet, to limit to and search within call numbers assigned to items

New feature: call number facet

 

Another feature coming soon (but not on Monday) is a date slider with a histogram visualization, which gives users the ability to limit by date range and see the frequency of hits in a given year. To see an example of a feature like this used elsewhere, click on this search of Articles+ and look to the lower left to see the date range and histogram.

Coming soon: date range

 

As always, your feedback is welcomed and appreciated. Please use the feedback link on the bottom center of the digital collections search page (or just click here), and tell us your thoughts!

HathiTrust Enhanced Access for Yale Users with Print Disabilities

Raymond Frohlich
Students with print disabilities now have enhanced access to an additional selection of digitized books through the HathiTrust. Yale University Library in partnership with the Resource Office on Disabilities are both pleased to announce the availability of this new service. Through its partnership with HathiTrust, Yale has access to millions of items through the HathiTrust Digital Library, however materials that are in-copyright or restricted are not available to our community by default.  Access to this restricted content has been made available through a recent legal ruling.  Instructions and further details about the service can be found here – http://web.library.yale.edu/hathitrust-access-yale-users-print-disabilities.
—
Thanks to Judy York, Carolyn Barrett, Anthony Kulikowski, and Rob Rocke from the Resource Office on Disabilities, and to John Gallagher, Katie Bauer, Cindy Greenspun, and Steve Wieda from the Yale University Library.

Learn about discovery interfaces at YUL with Rediscover Discovery

Jenn Nolte

Last year, after the successful upgrade of our Articles+ e-resource discovery service and the beginning of the public beta phase of our Quicksearch unified discovery interface, library staff held an information session called Rediscovery Discovery, where we demonstrated features, functionality and sample search strategies in the Articles+ discovery interface and debuted the Quicksearch discovery interface.

This year, we will hold Rediscover Discovery again, covering Articles+ but with more focus Quicksearch. We will also introduce the digital collections search currently in development.

Rediscover Discovery is primarily aimed at instruction and public services staff, but is open to anyone who’d like to attend. Please register for each session as space is limited!

There will be two information sessions:

  • Tuesday August 18th, 10-11am in Bass L06 A&B register
  • Thursday August 20th, 2:30-3:30pm in 17 Hillhouse L07 register

See you at Rediscover Discovery!

Project update: Digital collections search interface

Michael Friscia

Central ITS will be conducting the first of three load tests on the enhanced interface for digital collections on Friday July 17th between 1:30pm and 5pm. They will use a service called LoadRunner which determines the breaking point of an application by emulating real use by a number of concurrent users. The second two tests will take place between July 27 and July 30. I will follow up once these dates and times are confirmed.

These tests on the enhanced interface for digital collections are not expected to impact the current digital collections interface. Library IT will be monitoring the current digital collections interface on 7/17 for service disruptions.

I write to you regarding some testing on the enhanced interface for digital collections that may impact our current digital collections discovery service (http://findit.library.yale.edu). The enhanced interface for digital collections is a version of this digital collections discovery service, with features, functionality and security developed for use with more restricted digital materials. Like our unified discovery service,Quicksearch, both the digital collections interface and the enhanced version are powered by Blacklight.
Curious about what’s in the Yale University Library digital collections search? Here’s some clocks made by Paul Revere. We also have fire insurance maps of Seymour, CT– and much more! You can learn more about the Library’s discovery services (Articles+, Quicksearch and digital collections search) at the Rediscover Discovery forum in August (Tues 18th and Thurs 20th). More information on that coming soon.

If you have questions about this work, or notice any issues with http://findit.library.yale.edu, please let me know.

 

Mike Friscia

On behalf of the FindIT Project Implementation team:

Osman Din

Eric James

Tracy MacMath

Anju Meenattoor

Bob Rice

Lakeisha Robinson

Steelsen Smith

Kalee Sprague

Library and Workday testing results

clg34

After months of careful planning and testing, the Workday transition is close to becoming a reality.  Even though not much has changed for the library, as one of the downstream users, the library played a role in the testing of the patron data extract process.  This is to ensure that all of the Human Resources data is carried through into the Voyager patron database correctly.  A team of approximately 15 Access Services staff members from Sterling, Divinity and the CSSSI devoted some time analyzing patron records before and after text patron extracts for comparison.  Between all of us, we analyzed a little over 400 patron accounts for accuracy.  Additionally, ‘mock accounts’ that were created by University ITS staff were also examined (ie, new hires, terminations, job changes, etc) and carried through a Voyager patron extract correctly.  All in all, with a strong team composed of Access Services staff, Library IT and University IT, we were able to confirm that the data flow will remain unaffected.  This change is scheduled to take place on July 1st.  For extra measure, the same team who participated in the testing will also check Voyager patron records for accuracy after the first scheduled patron extract when the Workday transition happens. For questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out to me at cindy.greenspun@yale.edu.

For more information about Workday, please visit: http://news.yale.edu/2015/06/08/workdayyale-launch-july-1.

To see the last post about this, please visit: https://campuspress.yale.edu/libraryitnews/2015/01/12/the-library-prepares-for-workday-testing-with-university-its/

Library IT Tech Talk, May 28, 11-12 in CSSSI Classroom

Raymond Frohlich

Yale Library IT invites you to our May Tech Talk Lightning Round hosted by CSSSI. We will give a brief five-minute update on the topics below, followed by a ten-minute question and answer period. These talks are meant to be an informal way for IT staff to share information about initiatives and projects, while giving library staff the majority of the time for their questions and feedback. You are free to ask about any aspect of the initiative or project and not just what we elect to highlight.

 

The details:

Tech Talk Lightning Round

When: May 28, 11:00am to 12:00pm

Where: CSSSI Classroom

 

Agenda:

CrashPlan, George Ouellette

To provide a more cost effective and stable workstation backup service, Yale is migrating from TSM (Tivoli Storage Manager) to Code42’s CrashPlan. We will discuss where we are in the conversion process and our next steps to ensure that everyone’s data is protected.

 

Quicksearch Performance Tuning Techniques and Insights, Robert Rice

A brief overview of the tools and techniques used to optimize performance of the Quicksearch, the Library discovery service, which is based on Blacklight and Apache Solr.

 

Auditing Fedora 4, Eric James

An essential component of a repository is an audit service to log the events related to repository activity. There is ongoing work now to develop this feature. This involves setting up a model for capturing external events and tracking internal events by triggering the creation of audit objects based on reusable linked data namespaces, and leveraging the ability to take these object’s metadata and persist them in an external triplestore.

 

CSSSI StatLab Overview, Themba Flowers

An introduction to the StatLab and associated services provided to the research and teaching community at Yale.

 

Thanks very much to the staff at CSSSI for hosting this upcoming Tech Talk. We look forward to seeing you next week!

Library IT and LSF Complete GFA LAS Overhaul

Raymond Frohlich

Since the inception of the Library Shelving Facility (LSF), staff rely on GFA‘s Library Archival System (LAS) for inventory and storage management of both local and in transit items. Staff from Library IT and the LSF, in conjunction with GFA, have successfully completed both an upgrade and migration of the LAS application. Thanks to Mike DiMassa, Gary Burcheski, and staff at LSF for their participation in the planning and testing phases of the project.

For the original project announcement see here.

Quicksearch Update April 2015

Kalee Sprague

Several new features and bug fixes were rolled out in the first two weeks of April.

We did a full extract and re-load of all Orbis and Morris records, in order to take advantage of several changes we made in response to user Feedback.

To highlight a few of the changes made possible by the re-load:

  • All records will now have an Acquisitions Date, so sorting by Acquisitions Date will make more sense when sorting by ‘Acquired earliest’
  • URL Links stored in the MFHD are now extracted and will appear in the holdings section of the item view.
  • We updated the format mappings and labels for two formats – “Archives or Manuscripts” and “Dissertations & Theses”.  For more information about format mapping changes, see: How Quicksearch Assigns Format Facet Terms
  • We updated language mapping to add ISO 693-2 codes
  • We added 69x local subject fields to the Subject Index
  • We fixed the Google Books bug that sometimes caused the incorrect book cover to display

The total number of records extracted and re-loaded was:

Morris records: 459,491
Orbis records: 9,787,510

For a full list of bugs fixed in the April update, see the Quicksearch 4.0 Release Notes.

Update: Service Disruption Notification

Raymond Frohlich

Library IT trialled a fully automated disruption notification service from December 2014 through February 2015. Shortly thereafter we asked staff to participate in a short survey to evaluate the trial and found that the majority of survey respondents indicated a desire to see the service continue as an opt-in offering.

For those that provided feedback we thank you very much for your participation and helpful comments. We are pleased to announce that the disruption notification opt-in service is now available to all. Please take a moment and join the new opt-in mailing list at the following address: http://web.library.yale.edu/lit/email-alerts

If you are a supervisor or department head interested in registering your entire group, or you would like to recommend the monitoring of other public services, please coordinate with Cindy Greenspun (cindy.greenspun@yale.edu) in Library IT.  Please route all other questions or comments to Ray Frohlich (raymond.frohlich@yale.edu).