October has been a busy month for many staff members in Library IT — they have been traveling to local conferences to hone their craft and learn new skills.

Team members in Enterprise Systems and Services (Bob Rice, Keith Boyd-Carter, and Rick Aliwalas) attended  DevOpsDays in Hartford, October 10-11th. DevOpsDays is a community-organized, locally- hosted, not-for-profit conference series for DevOps practitioners. Topics typically covered are software development, IT infrastructure operations, and the intersection between them.

The Hartford conference focused on DevOps culture; specifically, how to transform your IT organization to a cloud native/microservices environment. Several of the speakers have gone though this shift in large organizations and shared their experiences. Overall, the focus was less on technology and more on the organizational value of the DevOps approach. One speaker used three military organizations — the Spartans, Mongols and Romans as an analogy for the three stages of DevOps adoption: infancy, adolescence and adulthood. Another speaker discussed how Ops engineers can bring value to an organization “outside of the [computer] terminal window.” The conference schedule is available online.

Jenn Nolte attended the edUi conference in Charlottesville, Virginia, September 25-27th. The edUi conference is for web professionals working at institutions of learning which can include colleges, universities, libraries, and museums. Themes included content strategy, and designing web experiences with empathy for diversity and inclusion. Jenn noted a workshop called Compassionate Content and UX was particularly valuable. Attendees were encouraged to think about designing content and experiences not just for the ‘typical’ user but for the edge cases— will designing an experience for a ‘typical’ user cause unnecessary stress or harm to the edge case user? This should be avoided whenever possible.

Jenn Nolte attended the HighEdWeb annual conference in Hartford, October 8-11th. The HighEdWeb annual conference is the conference created by and for higher-education web professionals. It offers four days of high-quality presentations, internationally-recognized keynote speakers and outstanding networking events. The conference provides professional development to web developers, marketers, programmers and designers, who are looking to explore the unique Web issues facing colleges and universities. Presentation themes included task-based IA and design for library web spaces (task-onomy over taxonomy), team-based content management, and brand management; e.g. staying on top of and ahead of your organization’s online reputation.

ENUG 2017
Several Library staff attended and presented at the ENUG 2017 conference this past October in Jersey City, New Jersey. The Ex Libris Northeast User Group (ENUG) is a regional group consisting of users from institutions using Ex Libris/ProQuest products in the states of Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont. Jenn Nolte, Digital Services Librarian in Library IT and Angela Sidman, Electronic Resources Librarian in Technical Services, jointly presented on the technical details to implementing the new database list (1-2-3- Database A-Z). Jenn Nolte also presented with Steelsen Smith, Technical Lead in Library IT, on the possibilities for optimizing e-resource discovery experience at Yale (The Path to Fulfillment). The descriptions of their presentations and the conference schedule is available online.