Notes from the CSU Libraries Summer Meeting 2019
Gabriel Gardner’s notes from LibIT/STIM Day at the CSU ULMS Summer Meeting
8/7/2019
Christina Hennesey welcome
9:30
172 people attending CSU Palooza at some point over the 3 days.
CSUN Dean Opening Remarks
10:00
Mark Stover so proud that CSUN hosting first Palooza that is not at the CO. Hopes that this will become a regular thing where we can all share our practices together.
He has long recognized the importance of technology to library work and believes it will continue to be essential and ubiquitous. Librarians simply cannot afford to let their technological literacy deteriorate or stagnate.
Noted that the ‘serials crisis’ has been going on for 30 years, still a crises, no end in sight except for more widespread adoption of Open access and more sustainable infrastructure for publishing.
Deans’ Panel
10:15
Karen Schneider, Patrick Newel, Emily Bonney, Rod Rodriguez
Where does money come from? Multiple sources, every campus does it differently
Money solves almost all problems, but funding is political and all politics is local. Very important for library to library to play politics.
Every librarian is an ambassador for the library on campus - how you behave and are perceived by peers on campus can directly impact funding.
Partnerships - on campus, out of silos if necessary - are crucial. Stamping your foot and pouting does not work, some Deans know from experience. Bring solutions to campus, not demands. Every entity on campus ‘demands’, not every one brings solutions and partnerships.
At Fullerton library budget has been cut or stayed flat every year for 15 years.
Communication is essential, the library and our budget should not be a black box. Costs of operation when transparent can help convince others on campus of problems and situation.
Cultivating relationships with the Academic Senate and ASI is important - show our relevance.
Frame around the students - they are the #1 priority.
Q&A
- At Chico are student lending fees separate from tuition, some campuses don’t get student success fee money
- how does centralized vs. in house library IT affect how you allocate time and money? At Fullerton they have a ‘library IT team’ that is part of central IT and reports to IT but consults with library dean - means library resources aren’t devoted to IP personnel. Stanislaus has centralized IT and 2 dedicated local people which they need for survival since service from central IT is not very fast. At Chico library reported to IT, makes it difficult to do NEW projects since IT don’t have library mindset and aren’t interested in learning on their own what library does and needs. When PeopleSoft came to Fresno many years ago, the PROVOST and IT wanted PeopleSoft to run the catalog - IT people think because they know computers they can do almost all library stuff, very hubristic.
- Comment from East Bay that they have long had a hostile relationship with IT which keeps trying to take over work done by their library.
- With new EO 1071, many new programs coming down waterfall but not necessarily funded appropriately. It is important for libraries to insert themselves into new program committees so that they can raise concerns. What we in the CSU need is to do a study about what programs/majors are offered at majority of CSU campuses and to have ECC funding align with the programs offered.
- Do any libraries get funding from extended Ed to offset costs of dealing with their patrons? At Fullerton and Sonoma: Yes.
- Any conversations going about system-wide support for OA? UC faculty don’t have to worry about funding to make their articles OA, we in the CSU need a centralized system like theirs. But there is a HUGE tension between asking for more funding for electronic resources while simultaneously asking for money to work on a different publishing model: Nascent discussion at COLD.
Building a dynamic website events display using LibCal RSS/XML and the Drupal 8 Aggregator
11:15 AM
Christian Ward
Known issues: many but they are documented online
In Drupal 7 there was a great ‘feeds’ module that worked great. In Drupal 8 a lot of those features are native, but not as robust. You have an RSS/Atom feed somewhere that you want to bring in to Drupal.
LibCal RSS, SacState recently started using LibCal to manage events. One single point of entry for public events that gets pushed out to external systems - signs, website, etc.
Drupal 8 Issues: doesn’t delete items before updating, only looks for new, results in phantom items that can’t be managed, deletion based on pubDate, if pubDate is null date epoch returned, no way to configure namespace fields
LibCal RSS issues: does not provide either feed or item level pubDate, all the good important metadata is put into namespace fields
Community suggestions to fix these issues:
import XML feed via the migrate module (very complicated setup)
Final solution: create a intermediate custom script that formats LibCal RSS feed
Drupal points to intermediate custom script, script harvests LibCal RSS
Data is refreshed every time Aggregator chron runs
Step 1: install and configure feed PHP script to a directory that Drupal can access, modify libcal-feed.php to point to LibCal RSS
Step 2: point the Drupal Aggregator to the intermediate libcal-feed.php script URL,
Step 3: create and configure view
View block Aggregator feed items; add feed item fields Title and Description; add filter (posted >= 12 hrs); add sort (posted on asc); make sure there is a null results display so that when there are no events in the RSS feed it doesn’t break display of Drupal page
Next Steps
- Not great that the intermediate script has to use an intermediate application server
- Ideally would be a Drupal module, living with the Drupal environment
Need to address web accessibility standards to add Aria-label for duplicate event titles (so that screen reader understands they are unique items)
Christian will share libcal-feed.php code on request.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) & Digital Initiatives
1:00 PM
Elizabeth Altman
CSUN used to have file and print server with extra drive hosted locally
They hosted special collections (SC/A) digital objects (and other things)
It was so full that backup was impossible, various problems with versioning and workflows
AWS cloud is hosted, resilient, backed up
Challenge: needed to move to AWS and preserve SC/A processing existing workflows as much as possible and work with existing campus tools
New hosting system needed to be: inexpensive, secure, automated, sustainable, distributed control
AWS components used: amazon glacier, cloudberry backup (3rd party product) S3 storage buckets, storage gateway, lambda, CloudWatch events, local Windows server for automated backup jobs
New preservation copy workflow: saved to a particular drive, Cloudberry backup running on local Windows server automatically pushes things saved to AWS Glacier
Lambda rules are needed to clear cache and reinstate components of S3 buckets
Advantages:
Now paying ~$30/month to store 7 terabytes, much cheaper than doing it locally.
Much more automation than previous local systems
S3 buckets and Amazon Glacier file size limit is 5TB no problem with that
Unexpected cost: private cloud, need to maintain connections between various components is $74/month
New challenges:
Workflows must be rigorously defined and followed
Nontrivial learning curve to AWS and other software
Items preserved are high quality -files- not the Description metadata associated with those files. development would be required to preserve files and metadata simultaneously using this system
Other problem: Library made deal and contract with AWS first, then CSUN campus inked a deal and forced library onto their contract and systems, which required setting up things all over again.
Innovative Use of Assistive Technology to serve users with/without disabilities
2:00 PM
Wei Ma and Cristina Springfield
https://bit.ly/CSUDHAT
What things are covered by AT? we should not just account for the ‘traditional’ ones but also hidden ones like cognitive learning
“Access is Love” a recommended project (social media hashtag #accessislove)
How should we think about disabilities: previously a medical definition, we should adopt a cultural definition
Goal #1: compliance, that which is legally obligated
Traditional service model: a specialized office takes the lead that has the equipment, faculty not widely trained, focus is on compliance
Goal #2: expand access so accessibility is possible anytime anywhere (as much as possible)
Barriers: administrative burden, stigma, costs born by students to obtain formal disabled status, historically disability work has been divorced from other ‘diversity’ work on campuses
Goal #3: serve those not typically targeted by traditional disability service model
Many things originally implemented as so called ‘accommodations’ actually benefit everyone e.g. automatic door openers, wheelchair ramps, gender neutral bathrooms
Work on this at DH: they didn’t have in the library specialized knowledge or funding for this so… they collaborated with university IT and campus student disability services center - got grant to purchase special hardware and software. SDRC didn’t have space for hardware so library housed it with SDRC paying for license fees and providing training on the software; campus IT installs software and hardware
Now at DH lib they have a wonderful room that can meet almost any student needs but students need to physically go visit it. Not ideal they wanted to get it out to everyone
Project 1: text-to-speech they got a web-based software for this and are promoting it heavily
Project 2: speech-to-text windows 10 and MacOS X have built in speech recognition features, DH put up a LibAnswers FAQ on how students can use those, Google also has a cloud Speech-to-text. So, no purchase by library necessary but they promote helpful ubiquitous features students might not know about.
Made a LibGuide for all disability services on campus with very detailed instructions on how to use each product
They are also doing a big social media push for all their accessibility offerings
Further ideas: integrate into infolit instruction? insert a text-to-speech button on ereserves
Q&A Reflection/Share Out
What about ATI? Whole CSU is supposed to move to that. Every campus will have a steering committee or individual ‘champion’, every library needs to work on this. ATI requirements are more strict than 508 rules.
NOTE: LibCal event registration form contains a WebAIM error, empty button, need to report to Springshare https://csulb.libcal.com/event/5638031
LibAnswers homepage (and individual FAQ entries) has 4 empty link errors, need to investigate: https://csulb.libanswers.com/
4 errors on the Primo Advanced Search page
Data Visualizations: How to Communicate you Library’s Data
3:15 PM
Jenny Wong-Welch
What is it: an umbrella term including graphs, charts, mindmaps, etc.
Uses: instruction - mindmaps; digital humanities - metadata tags; marketing the library, our spaces, our resources, our services; assessment - heatmaps, charts to understand usage patterns
Use data viz in your own research: collection analysis, citation analysis, space usage,
It can take a lot of work to make a pretty picture: very messy process:
Acquire: we have mountains of data though it is often in various areas and hard to get and aggregate together
NOTE: could add a ‘data/statistics’ type tag to the LibGuides A-Z filter list
Examine: understand the data you have, qualitative v quantitative
Parse and Filter: almost all data will require some filtering to produce a visualization that makes sense, document all steps
Basic Traditional Tools:
- excel
- openrefine
- Python/R
‘bibliomining’
Data mining models:
- association
- clustering
- classification
- regression
Format/process: in SDSUs makerspace they put all documentation in GitHub
3 stages of understanding: Perceiving, interpreting, comprehending
Don’t lie with data: many things can’t be compared truthfully in graphs
Context behind data is crucial
Certain types of data lend themselves to certain types of visualization
Fancier Tools:
- Tableau
- Simply Analytics
- Bubblus
- Noun Project
- Freepik
- Piktochart
- Adobe Illustrator
- D3.js
- matplotlib in Python
- app.rawgraphs.io
https://tinyurl.com/csudataviz
Meeting recap
4:15 PM
- STIM Ron Rodriguez from Stanislaus income Chair, there are 2 openings
- Schol Comm, new committee, Patrick Newell Chair, Mark Stover vice chair, goals: make a copyright first responders curriculum, make a guide to centralize information for CSU about scholcomm, run various surveys to gauge interest in possible initiatives, need to discuss researcher profile systems in conjunction with STIM and various campus ORSP offices,
- ScholarWorks Kevin Cloud: move from Multiple instance approach with D-Space to single instance approach for all 23 campuses on Hyrax/Samvera, there are now SW interest groups of volunteers who are working on issues identified by a COLD report about repository needs
ULMS Summer Meeting
8/8/2019
Welcome from Mark Stover
9:45 AM
Today is the biggest crowd yet. We have such a wealth of knowledge in the system and events like this let us share it. Hopefully everyone will come away with important information today.
The behind the scenes work that people here do is essential, though we often do not get the praise and attention that others in the library do. Mark wants everyone to know they are valued! Various housekeeping notes.
John Wenzler CSUEB, chair of the COLD ULMS steering committee; thanks to the steering committee and Brandon Dudley who organized this event and made COLD aware of the importance of these events. We need to use this opportunity to build connections across campuses.
Discovery Committee meeting
10:00 AM
We need to find a new chair - Ryan Schwab stepping down to move to UCSC. Andrew Carlos fell on this sword.
NOTE: need to email out the ELUNA presentation about Primo Analytics problems to the list because this was a Disco task force item to be done
Task force discussion - DW says we probably don’t need a discovery person on the norm rules task force; discussion
At Sac State Christian has set up Google site search to track every individual Primo search
NOTE: I am Vice Chair (by default since the other members are cycling off after this year)
We need CSU discovery drop in sessions where campuses that need help can come
Christian suggests we need a way for programmers to work together on technical issues that doesn’t place more burden on Dave and Zach. Need more of an open sharing environment - have a feature on Confluence where anyone can suggest features? Have a disco forum about ‘the lay of the land’ and how people can contribute (github pull requests, etc.)
If You Build it, Will They Come? Natural Experiments with Springshare’s Proactive Chat Reference
11:30 AM
Me, Joanna Kimmitt, Mike DeMars
My presentation about our and Dominguez Hills’ experience with pop-up chat.
Unfortunately (fortunately?) I forgot to hit the record button so it is lost to the sands of time.
Primo Usability With Diverse Populations in Mind
1:45 PM
Andrew Carlos & Lee Adams
When you look up ‘EDI’ in LISTA you don’t get things about diversity. A lot of the conversation about equity in libraries does not permeate the literature, it takes place in blogs, live presentations, etc.
Word choice is very important when thinking about this population and how they will relate to library systems, go for lowest common denominator universal understanding as much as possible
Lots of Primo UX literature is focused on Classic UI, need more studies on NUI
At East Bay they did 2 focus groups, got IRB, 7 students each group, incentivized with pizza and battery pack, recorded the focus groups then had them professionally transcribed - only after trying to use automation transcription which failed
Expect students to flake out and not attend testing sessions they signed up for…
Zoom sessions had a lot of background noise - making transcription expensive
Poll of librarians shows that we think the students think it is more intimidating than they actually do. They seem to just use it!
Q&A
Need to test Primo with JAWS, supposedly hard to stop reader at search box
English as second language speakers report that lots of jargon in Primo is not easily understandable
CSU GetIt Menu Update
3:15 PM
David Walker & Zach Williams
David & Zach’s plans to fix default GetIt and ViewIt menus
Some central package changes coming before the beginning of Fall semester:
- moving the sendTo menu
- removing the full record sidebar jump links
NOTE: I need to setup authentication in sandbox
change owner profile to your campus
then setup login profiles - an local ALMA Internal profile will be easy to setup and allow testing.