LIT and partners Tech Talk | Wednesday May 18th 2016

Next Wednesday May 18th, from 2:30pm-3:30pm in Bass L06, join Library IT and partners in our monthly discussion of tech-related projects around the Library and beyond.

Our agenda includes:

  • Adding/migrating collections to Findit (George Ouellette)
  • Tour of Software at Yale (ITS web site) (Beatrice Richardson)
  • Google Cultural Institute (Jenn Nolte)
  • ArchivesSpace updates (Matthew Gorham)

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 

See you there!

Grouper Representatives Meet with ITS

GrouperLoaderArchitectureDiagram

Representatives for Grouper met with ITS July 15th to 17th to introduce their product. From the website[1]:

“Grouper is an enterprise access management system designed for the highly distributed management environment and heterogeneous information technology environment common to Universities. Operating a central access management system that supports both central and distributed IT reduces risk.”

Three members of library IT, Steelsen Smith, Lakeisha Robinson and Eric James were in attendance for the Wednesday session. The morning started with an overview of the product, in essence a java stack with a programming and web service API. It was demonstrated how it can pull together subject information from external identity management providers, and provide a means for creating and managing groups of users, with attributes, privileges, permissions, and roles that can be made available for applications requiring group level authentication and authorization. Group membership information can then be combined and reused in exclusion and inclusion logic allowing for an extendable set of permissions at the application level. The session delved into the use cases of 3 subsets of university IT – person registries, learning management systems, and library systems. So, for example, a course managed in canvas or sakai could use groups of shoppers, instructors, TA’s, guests, and enrolled students to grant dynamic privileges to course materials. VPN usage campus wide could be administered with fine control and help manage provisioning workflows. Restricted library collections such as the Henry Kissinger Papers could efficiently manage sets of permissions by including patrons in pragmatically defined authorization groups. Common to each of the use cases is the challenge of integrating the different identity providers feeding the grouper application with interoperable and unique subject information. Stay tuned for further developments, including a potential rollout in the December timeframe.

[1] http://www.internet2.edu/products-services/trust-identity-middleware/grouper/

Library and Workday testing results

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/

ScholarSphere Conference at Yale University Library

Yale University Library and Yale ITS are pleased to sponsor a conference and public lecture on ScholarSphere, a software project developed at Penn State University, based on the same open-source Hydra/Fedora framework in use at YUL.

Yale University Library and ITS are investigating the possible adoption of this solution to enable Yale faculty and researchers to self-archive their own digital content in a managed, secure repository for controlled or open dissemination as well as for their own use. Our speakers will talk about the ScholarSphere project both from a technical perspective and as a service model. More information on the ScholarSphere website here.

Speakers:

Patricia Hswe, Digital Content Strategist and Head, ScholarSphere User Services at Penn State University
Daniel Coughlin, Ph.D. Candidate at Penn State University

via Yale University Library News: ScholarSphere Conference Archives.

Library IT and Yale ITS collaborate on Office 2013 targeted deployment at YUL

The IT Infrastructure & Client Services unit is working with the Endpoint Engineering group at Yale ITS to begin automatically deploying Office 2013 to select Library workstations this week.

Workstations in MSSA and at Beinecke will receive their upgrades on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings,respectively. Next Thursday November 6 , systems in Access Services will be upgraded and on Tuesday November 11, Acquisitions and Cataloging will receive the upgrade.

Over the next several weeks, we will deploy Office 2013 to additional departments and libraries. Detailed information will continue to be distributed via the YULIB mailing list.

Reon Keller has been conducting Office 2013 overview sessions throughout the summer and into the fall to prepare the YUL community for this upgrade. Reon is holding another session in the Bass classroom on Thursday October 30 at 10 am. You are encouraged to attend if you have not done so. Seating is limited so please register here:

https://bmsweb.med.yale.edu/tms/tms_enrollments.offerings?p_crs_id=5440

Additionally, you can further prepare for the upgrade by viewing the lynda.com online videos available to the Yale community by visiting http://www.yale.edu/lynda and watching Office 2013 New Features. We also encourage you to check out the Office 2013 Quick Start Guides.