Library Service Overview Updates

Library IT began an initiative last year in 2016 to implement a standard set of documentation for library services establishing expectations and documenting the resources required to provide ongoing operational support. Borrowing elements from service-level agreements, these overviews are internal agreements between the service owner and the library units that support the service, all of whom have an interest in service success and sustainability. These are living documents that will change as the nature of the service evolves.

To date the following services now have approved overviews:

Library IT is working with various stakeholders, user groups, and committees to move forward overviews for Avalon, GFA LAS, FindIt, Emulation as a Service, as well as the MSSA payment gateway application. For existing services, events such as an upgrade, migration, or enhancement will trigger the creation of a new overview should one not already exist. The creation of an overview is now included as a step in the implementation and deployment of new Library IT supported services.

Should you have any questions about these documents or the process Library IT has established, please do not hesitate to reach out to Ray Frohlich at raymond.frohlich@yale.edu for more information.

Upcoming Staff Departure

It is with humble gratitude and some measure of sadness that Shareq Rashid, Sr. Administrative Assistant at LIT, has announced his resignation from his current position effective Thursday, June 8th, 2017. He will thereafter be transferring to a Senior Executive Assistant position at the Yale Law School’s Office of Development under the tutelage of Mary Matheron, the Associate Dean for Development.

Shareq wishes to thank every single staff member he’s had the privilege of working with over the last two years, for welcoming him into the LIT family and allowing him the autonomy to mold this position into a highly enjoyable professional experience.  As he prepares for his departure, he has committed to extensively documenting each and every process he oversees, in order to  ensure that his successor will be able to hit the ground running.

Shareq hopes to stop by and say goodbye to everybody in the department in person prior to his last day. This visit may or may not coincide with a nudge to provide pending receipts. He also insists that he had nothing to do with the drafting of this blog post.

 

Recent Staff Departures

The Digital Library & Programming (DL&P) team in Library IT is in the process of addressing the departure of three of its valued members. With the recent departures of Mike Friscia, Osman Din, and Eric James, we will have the following interim reporting structure in DL&P.

On an interim basis, Dale Hendrickson has taken over Mike Friscia’s role managing DL&P, with Kalee Sprague and Lakeisha Robinson serving as interim team leads. Kalee and Lakeisha will be responsible for two teams within the unit to handle day-to-day activities. Kalee’s team will be comprised of Anju Meenattoor and the Programmer III position we are currently in the process of filling. Lakeisha’s team will be comprised of Tracy MacMath and a potential term position. These two teams are designed to be interdependent and will cross allocate workloads.

Despite these vacancies, Library IT staff are making every effort to remain on track with our critical goals while keeping an eye on the future. We thank the YUL community for its understanding as we navigate this period of transition.

New Staff Announcements

Over the last two months, Library IT has had the distinct pleasure of welcoming two new staff members.

In April, Cvetan Terziyski joined us as an IT Support Technician on the Workstation & Technology Services Team in Library IT. Cvetan is originally from Sofia, Bulgaria and has attended the University of Sofia St. Kliment Ohridski, where he earned a Masters’ degree in Computer Science/Information Security.  During his studies, he worked for WEBCOM Consult Ltd., where he provided network administration and desktop support for the Bulgarian subsidiaries of large multinational companies, including but not limited to McDonalds, TEVA Pharmaceuticals, and Starbucks. He also worked extensively with many local firms.  Cvetan moved to the United States in 2016 and was hired as a contractor with Library IT thereafter. He had been working for W&TS for six months as a contractor before being brought on full-time.

On June 5th, Patrick Stone will start at Library in the capacity of a Workflow Analyst/Programmer. In this position, Patrick will work with the Access Services and Technical Services departments to evaluate needs, identify process improvements, and implement technical solutions to improve efficiencies and drive organizational change. Patrick most recently worked at UBS AG in Stamford as a Software Developer/Engineer for the Infrastructure Software Group.  He had significant responsibilities related to application design, engineering, project management, and full life cycle development of server provisioning tools for UBS.  Prior to that he worked for both UBS and Citigroup providing support and development for their global Citrix implementations. Patrick holds a BA in Computer Science from SUNY Oswego, and a MS in Technology Management from Mercer University in Atlanta.

Cvetan and Patrick can be reached at cvetan.terziyski@yale.edu and patrick.stone@yale.edu respectively. We thank all the staff members within and beyond Library IT who contributed to the search process for these positions. Welcome to the Team!

Hydra Connect 2016

Hydra Project
This week, from October 3rd to October 6th, Boston Public Library hosted the Hydra Connect 2016 conference. Project Hydra is a repository solution managing components involved in storing and providing access to digital content. Project Hydra can be described in broad terms as the confluence of community and collaboration made manifest in the development of open source software, and the conference brought together close to 200 people from institutions across the globe to connect. Seven people attended from Yale Library, Mike Friscia, Anju Meenattoor, Lakeisha Robinson, George Ouellette, Youn Noh, Osman Din, and Eric James.

The conference was organized as workshops on Monday, a plenary session Tuesday morning, a poster session Tuesday afternoon, multi-tracked presentations/panels/lightning talks Wednesday, and breakout sessions Thursday. Topics were varied but commonly themed. There was discussion of service management and project management taking into consideration issues such as adoption, migration, and upgrade paths. There was a focus on the learning, sharing and best practices of the technology itself – the software stack, infrastructure, deployment, and monitoring. Much of the presentation centered around the community efforts driving base applications such as the Sufia institutional repository, the Avalon AV system, and the Fedora repository. Content specific challenges were addressed from both an an abstract modeling perspective to the unique considerations of GIS assets, newspapers, images, AV materials, and research data, through frameworks such as the PCDM/hydra works and the IIIF specifications.

The enthusiasm was palpable and the project hydra motto “if you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together” was evident, but in many ways there what prevailed was a constant tension between customization and consolidation – the need for diverse institutions to implement a variety of special features while simultaneously developing towards an easily maintainable common core. In any case the takeaways from the conference will influence the direction of services provided by the Yale Library longterm, from the digital collections interface FindIT, the Yale instance of the AV Avalon Platform, to the unified search interface Quicksearch.

References:
https://projecthydra.org
https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/hydra/Hydra+Connect+2016
https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/hydra/Hydra+Connect+Meetings

hc2016_group_photo

Library Service Overviews

Library IT began an initiative in early 2016 to implement a standard set of documentation for library services that establish expectations and the resources required to provide ongoing operational support. Borrowing similarities from service-level agreements, these overviews are internal agreements between the service owner and the library units that support the service, all of whom have an interest in service success and sustainability. These are living documents that will change as the nature of the service evolves.

To date the following services now have approved overviews:

Library IT is working with various stakeholders, user groups, and committees to move forward overviews for Ares, Avalon, FindIt, ILLiad, and other key services. For existing services, events such as an upgrade, migration, or enhancement will trigger the creation of a new overview should one not already exist. The creation of an overview is now included as a step in the implementation and deployment of new library supported services.

Should you have any questions about these documents or the process Library IT has established, please do not hesitate to reach out to Ray Frohlich for more information.

Slides and Recordings from Rediscover Discovery III

REDISCOVER DISCOVERY III: UPDATES TO DISCOVERY

Thanks to all who attended, online or in person, to the Library’s third Rediscover Discovery Day! The goal for this presentation is to provide updates on our major discovery interfaces to public services, instruction, and information desk staff so that they can incorporate the most current information on our discovery systems into their instruction sessions in the coming semester.

This session covered recent updates to features and functionality for:

We also shared the some of the upcoming changes in store for these discovery systems as well. A big thank you to Angela Sidman for covering the recent and upcoming developments in Articles+ and other e-resource access systems!

The slides and session recording of this year’s Rediscover Discovery can be accessed here: https://yale.box.com/v/rediscodisco3

HOW’D WE DO?

For those who attended or viewed online, or for those who will watch the recording afterwards, please take a few minutes to let us know how we didhttp://tinyurl.com/rediscodisco3

Attending Ivies+ Discovery Day: July 25th 2016 at MIT

MIT Libraries rotunda
MIT Libraries rotunda

The second annual Ivies+ Discovery Day took place at MIT in Cambridge, MA on July 25th 2016. Representatives from many of the Ivies+ libraries attended, including four librarians from Yale: Jenn Nolte, Sarah Tudesco, Angela Sidman and Kalee Sprague.

The day started off with a keynote address on discovery and serendipity from MIT Libraries Director Chris Bourg. Following that, Laura Morse from Harvard presented on updates from the Open Discovery Initiative, a NISO committee of which she is co-chair.

The later part of the morning then shifted into a ’round robin’ of 5 minute demonstrations followed by 5 minutes of Q&A  from eleven Ivies+ institutions. Each institution’s demo focused on their own particular discovery landscape. Some were at the beginning stages of implementation, others showcased the enhancements they’ve rolled out since the first Ivies+ Discovery Day in April 2015. Angela Sidman and Jenn Nolte demonstrated Yale’s unified discovery service, Quicksearch– which wasn’t even publicly available at Discovery Day last year!

After a lunch break, 2 consecutive breakout sessions followed with simultaneous presentations. The topics and slides for these are up on the Ivies+ Discovery Day website. Of particular note were presentations on discovery-related work at Yale University Library:

The path to Unified Discovery at Yale: Past, Present and Future (Jenn Nolte)
Discovery @ Yale: A Google Analytics Story (Sarah Tudesco)

The day ended with a fun and interactive session involving all attendees, with the goal of articulating and prioritizing collaborative efforts among Ivies+ institutions with regard to discovery. Attendees were given sticky notes to write down ideas for collaboration, and each attendee also received five stickers to vote on the ideas they liked the most. The notes from that exercise are also linked on the Ivies+ Discovery Day website.

The second Ivies+ Discovery Day was fast-moving, full of great information and great colleagues from across the Ivies+ universe. We attendees from Yale were very grateful for the excellent job our colleagues at MIT did in organizing the event, and look forward to Ivies+ Discovery Day 2017!

LIT and partners Tech Talk | Wednesday September 21st 2016

On Wednesday September 21st, from 3pm-4pm in Bass L01, join Library IT and partners in our monthly discussion of tech-related projects around the Library and beyond.

Our tentative agenda includes:

  • Hathi Trust (Robert Klingenberger)
  • YUL and Accessibility (Kalee Sprague and Tracy MacMath)
  • Service Now (Beatrice Richardson)
  • Avalon for Music Library (Cindy Greenspun, George Ouellette and Jonathan Manton)

For those who cannot join us in person, the session will be streamed via Adobe Connect:

http://greet.yale.edu/littechtalk/ [sign in as a guest]

Slides and recordings of the Tech Talk sessions will be archived in https://yale.box.com/LITTechTalkArchives.

Please remember: any Library staff is welcome to present at the Tech Talks! Please send topic suggestions to Jenn  Nolte or anyone else in Library IT.

See you there!

Event Announcement: Rediscover Discovery III: Updates to Discovery

This Friday August 19th, attend the Library’s third Rediscover Discovery session!
The session is aimed providing updates on our major discovery interfaces to public services, instruction, and information desk staff  so that they can incorporate the most current information on our discovery systems into their instruction sessions in the coming semester.  This session will cover recent updates to features and functionality for:
  • Articles+
  • Quicksearch
  • Digital Collections (FindIt)
We will also share the some of the upcoming changes in store for these discovery systems as well.
Join us on Friday August 19th, from 2:30-3:30pm in Bass L01 A&B for our third Rediscover Discovery event.  Sign up to attend the event in Bass in person here: http://schedule.yale.edu/event.php?id=1146001
Alternatively, you can watch live online at http://greet.yale.edu/rediscodisco. The event recording will also be distributed after the session is over.
See you there!
~Jenn Nolte