Notes from the CSU Libraries Summer Meeting 2018

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CSU ULMS Summer Meeting 2018

LOCATION: CHANCELLOR’S OFFICE, LONG BEACH

AGENDA: HTTPS://CALSTATE.ATLASSIAN.NET/WIKI/SPACES/ULMS/PAGES/610238465/

MONDAY, AUGUST 13

This day was six hours of analytics training led by Megan Drake from Ex Libris. There were many breaks and opportunities to socialize with staff and faculty from our other system campuses. We covered introductory topics for our Institution Zone, advanced topics (sadly there was no “intermediate” between introductory and advanced), and Network Zone analytics.
I learned quite a bit, as I’m sure the other people from our campus did. We are all better informed and able to do more reporting and structuring than we were prior to this day of training. The software still has some quirks and mysteries which elude me but we will now make much more progress on transparent data for librarians to use in their collection analyses.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 14

This day offered five different tracks depending upon functional area: fulfillment, resource sharing, resource management, acquisition/electronic resources, and discovery. I spent all day in the discovery track. The following individuals presented or emceed: David Walker [CO], David Palmquist [Fullerton], Nikki Demoville [SLO], Christian Ward [SacState], Megan Drake [ExL], Mike DeMars [Fullerton], and Zachary Williams [Pomona].
Some content was familiar to me but I learned some new things. Perhaps most importantly, this meeting provided a gathering were people could meet and share their problems with Primo in a low pressure atmosphere. All the campuses have the same basic setup and problems while the differences we have provide inspiration to (possibly) improve and food for thought.
Highlights:

  • There’s no technical impediment to bringing in e-reserves information to Primo via an automated method. This would reduce the work time that staff do creating dummy records in Alma for the links to e-reserves. The drawback is that the metadata using this automated method is very sparse. You can see the XML here: http://csulb.libguides.com/oai.php?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=oai_dc&set=er_courses
  • I got some ideas from Christian and Zachary about enhancements to our No Results page. Specifically pushing people who land on that page out to WorldCat or Google Scholar.
  • The results of a new round of usability testing at 5 campuses were presented. We are already following the best practices they identified with a couple exceptions, which I’ll be fixing shortly.
  • “Library Search” the first element in the Primo header links will be changed to “New Search” to more accurately reflect what happens when you click it.
  • Testing showed that people really had problems finding the ‘Expand my results’ checkbox to toggle on Primo Central Index. We already have PCI turned on for the EVERYTHING search. But I left it off by default for the ARTICLES search. After seeing the results of the test, I’ll will turn PCI on by default in ARTICLES.