The Ohio State University The Ohio State University

 

Information Technology

Category: Musings

Reading w/Dan: “Technical Debt”

July 17, 2022 / / Comments Off on Reading w/Dan: “Technical Debt”

"Toward a Conceptual Framework for Technical Debt in Archives" article cover In my latest installment of Reading w/Dan, I’m following up on a suggestion from Carly Dearborn, our Ohio Public Policy Archivist, and have read “Toward a Conceptual Framework for Technical Debt in Archives” recently published in The American Archivist Spring/Summer 2022 issue. The article by Déirdre Joyce, Laurel McPhee, Rita Johnston, Julia Corrin and Rebecca Hirsch explores applying a framework based upon the concept of “technical debt” to inform decision-making in archives and libraries, in the management of their digital collections, objects and systems.

The concept of technical debt comes from the software development community, in which it describes the negative impact of compromises in the design and development of a software/system/platform—intentional or inadvertent—on efficiency and future administration, management and/or development. The authors suggest that the technical debt metaphor can be applied to archival and library practices, “In archives, the best purpose of a modified technical debt metaphor may be to develop a framework that helps archivists examine the strategies and work cultures driving decisions at their repositories and thereby prevent unmanageable technical debt from becoming an inevitable result of digital collections work.”

The concept is a mere 30-years old, first articulated in 1992. Even more importantly, it wasn’t until over a decade later that the software development community began considering it in the terms of a framework that can be used for strategy and decision-making. The authors describe this history before moving on to delve more deeply into how it can be applied as a conceptual framework for the archival/library community. In applying it to our profession, they note, “…while many other important foci exist in archives, such as community engagement, education, and public services, we limit the scope of this proposed framework to collections and digital asset management.”

Citing Nicolli Rios et al’s “A Tertiary Study on Technical Debt” they observe, “…planning deficiencies and unskillful project management as the most commonly cited causes of debt…other factors include a lack of knowledge or expertise among staff members, personality conflicts, weak documentation, and organizational issues such as resource allocation and business processes…” These are topics that I believe resonate with us in Ohio State’s University Libraries, especially as we continue our work around workflow process improvement and prioritized decision-making.

In moving from Fowler’s “Technical Debt Quadrant” to a “Technical Debt Quadrant modified for archives,” the authors eventually arrive at a “Model of the Conceptual Framework for Technical Dept in Archives.”

FIGURE 1. Fowler’s Technical Debt Quadrant

FIGURE 2. Technical Debt Quadrant modified for archives

FIGURE 3. Model of the Conceptual Framework for Technical Debt in Archives

The authors present three case studies from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Carnegie Mellon University and Yale University that examine the impact of technical debt on their operations. The technical debt arose from various deliberate and inadvertent factors including lack of documentation to failure to adopt standards to inconsistency in metadata practices.

Three points the authors make in their conclusion particularly resonated with me that I believe can help inform our work in the University libraries:

  • “The UNC–Charlotte case study, for example, introduced us to the ubiquitous nature of documentation debt.”
  • “Likewise, looking at the Carnegie Mellon case through the technical debt framework reveals a deliberate effort to mitigate its own documentation debt—or, at the very least, make it more transparent.”
  • Finally the use case from Yale views how “…the framework emphasizes how declaring bankruptcy on debt-laden projects can release organizations from a perceived obligation to sustain the unsustainable…” something we need to consider as we continue to migrate content from our so-called Dark Archive.

This is an interesting article that can help frame our discussions around process improvement and decision-making. Further, conceptually, technical debt should be a factor in any of our organizational discussions concerning system development, implementation, use and management, and sunsetting.  I will leave you with two final quotes from their Conclusion:

  • “All this notwithstanding, we maintain that—when carefully applied—the framework helps prevent oversimplification of the technical debt metaphor, such as an assumption that “shortcuts now equal more work later.” After all, shortcuts can represent sound decision-making (think: “more product, less process”).”
  • “Moreover, inefficiencies or complexity in systems or processes are not necessarily bad; they are only problematic when staff and users are repeatedly slowed down by interacting or working around them. To that end, additional study that centers agency and the human role in technical debt management could potentially expand the framework in meaningful ways.”

Déirdre Joyce, Laurel McPhee, Rita Johnston, Julia Corrin, and Rebecca Hirsch “Toward a Conceptual Framework for Technical Debt in Archives” The American Archivist Vol. 85, No. 1, Spring/Summer 2022

Reading w/Dan: DPC’s “EDRMS Preservation Toolkit”

June 29, 2022 / / Comments Off on Reading w/Dan: DPC’s “EDRMS Preservation Toolkit”

Cover of DPC's EDRMS ToolkitThe Digital Preservation Coalition or DPC (https://www.dpconline.org/) is a membership organization, formed two decades ago and based in the UK, who’s vision is “…to secure our digital legacy.” To Achieve that vision, their mission is to, “…enable our members to deliver resilient long-term access to digital content and services, helping them to derive enduring value from digital assets and raising awareness of the strategic, cultural and technological challenges they face. We achieve our aims through advocacy, community engagement, workforce development, capacity-building, good practice and good governance.”

While based in the UK, the DPC has 33 full members and more than 100 associate members worldwide. The DPC makes a significant amount of its resources freely available, even to non-members. Their website has a particularly useful area, “Implement digital preservation” ( https://www.dpconline.org/digipres/implement-digipres), which includes among other tools the DPC’s Rapid Assessment Model (DPC RAM), Digital Preservation Policy Toolkit and the topic of this posting, the EDRMS Preservation Toolkit (https://www.dpconline.org/digipres/implement-digipres/edrms-preservation-toolkit).

What is an EDRMS? It is an electronic document and records management system. They define a record keeping system “…as the manual or automated applications, policies and processes implemented to capture, organize, and categorize records. Record keeping systems support the management, access, retrieval, use, and disposition of records. They include both EDRMS [such as Hyland’s OnBase which Ohio State uses] and document-centric collaboration platforms such as SharePoint [Teams], Office365 [which is also used at Ohio State] and Google Drive.”

This Toolkit is constructed in an accessible manner for records novices and experts alike. The DPC define a record, as per the ISO 15489-1:2016 standard, as having to have content, context and structure; that contextual and structural information may be included in descriptive, rights, technical and/or administrative metadata; and that to be trusted they need to be authentic, reliable, have integrity and be usable.

The Toolkit discusses the preservation challenges that record keeping presents, and provides an in-depth examination of the preservation process that address topics amongst other: “Understanding the problem” to “Gathering the right team” to “Assessing the risks” and “Selecting a preservation approach.” It further provides a detailed analysis of the potential metadata to be captured. Finally, it speculates about the future of records preservation and provides a plethora of additional resources.

The DPC notes that, “The advice within this resource is intended to be broad enough to be applicable to any type or size of organization…whether they are a national archive, a business archive or a local record office and whether they are responsible for preserving records from a wide range of external sources or their own internal record keeping system/s.” As such I recommend this as a must read for those that lead the records management efforts within an organization, and/or those responsible for collecting and preserving records. Further, I would strongly encourage all organization personnel to peruse this as a means of understanding the basics of records management and preservation.

A View from the Support Desk

November 5, 2018 / / Comments Off on A View from the Support Desk

It’s always good to take a couple of minutes and celebrate the good work that happens around the libraries.  And that’s what I’d like to briefly do here today.  I’m going to highlight three specific instances that have taken place over the past couple of weeks in Infrastructure Support that merit a second look.

Spot Bonus: Gaymon Wright

url: https://library.osu.edu/site/osulstaff/2018/11/02/spot-bonus-gaymon-wright/

It is important to recognize those times when staff go above and beyond their normal work to ensure that that the day to day business of the Libraries can get done.  You can read the description of the spot bonus above, but essentially, Gaymon spend nearly 200 hours over a number of weeks working with Dell to determine the cause of a faulty vendor software update that impacted a number of critical services.  This problem caused significant issues – issues that should have made work in many parts of the Libraries down right difficult to completed.  But largely, the Libraries didn’t notice the problems because Gaymon was up at 4 am every morning making sure services were running.  He worked closely with Dell, helping them recreate our environment in their labs and eventually helped them recreate the issue so that they could identify the faulty code and work towards a fix.  This was hard work – but the fact that these issues went largely unnoticed by the Libraries underscores the extraordinary measures Gaymon went to do ensure that the organization could continue with business as usual while we worked with our vendors towards a permanent fix.

Kudos: Wiki Conference

url: https://library.osu.edu/site/osulstaff/2018/11/02/kudos-holbrook-gooch-hayneshaynes-long-ruiz-wotsch-reese-garabis-buckey-mcclung-andersen-liberator-bonds-lee-springs/

You might have heard that the Libraries hosted the 2018 North America Wiki Conference.  Approximately 2-300 individuals spent 4 days at various locations around the Libraries discussing various aspects of the Wikipedia ecosystem.  I’d like to thank Rico and Warren for flexing their schedules and spending Saturday and Sunday providing audio/video support for the conference.  I actually knew a fair number of the library attendees and throughout the conference, I heard a good deal of positive feedback regarding the interactions that the speakers and organizers had had with support.  Overall, this felt like a positive experience, and one where we learned a lot in terms of how we might approach some of the technical challenges that surfaced over the course of the 4 days should we host an event like this again.

Libraries’ PCs adding Adobe Creative Cloud

url: https://library.osu.edu/site/osulstaff/2018/10/17/libraries-pcs-adding-adobe-creative-cloud-service/

In response to a campus-wide license changes related to Adobe products, the Libraries has been planning how we would update the nearly 500 PCs running variations of Adobe software in the Libraries.  This included working with OCIO to understand the license changes, writing documentation (as found in the above link) and creating a new update package for enterprise distribution as part of our normal patch/update cycle.  In planning this rollout, Gary has been our primary point of contact with OCIO, as we have sought to understand the time-table and any unintended implications.  As we prepared, Gary wrote the above documentation, and then starting 10/26 – Infrastructure Support started pushing the new licensed software.  Overall, the process worked well – most staff found that their software updated and was simply ready to go.  For those that had experienced issues (primarily system slow-downs), Gary, Gaymon and our students have been visiting machines and handling issues.  In many cases, the Adobe update didn’t cause problems, but tended to exasperate existing ones given the size and complexity of the update.  However, since 10/27 – the Libraries has updated nearly 72% of all the machines that we manage.  This is a very high percentage, as nearly 10-15% of our machines are always invisible to our update process at any time due to being disconnected from the network or shutoff.  But this change has been an example of a quick and successful rollout of a set of software that is critical to many of our colleague’s work.

–tr

 

 

A View from the Support Desk

October 7, 2018 / / Comments Off on A View from the Support Desk

This week saw some big happenings in the Infrastructure Support department.  As Jennifer posted on Tuesday (10/2), I’ve been given the opportunity and privilege of leading the Infrastructure Support team.  While there will be some work to do as I juggle the short and long-term goals of Digital Initiatives and Infrastructure Support – I’m also really interested in looking at where these two programs intersect, and how I can work closely together with Beth and the AD&S team to develop a cohesive IT vision for the Libraries.  There seems to be an opportunity here to really think strategically  and make some significant progress in support of the Libraries’ new strategic plan.

With that in mind, I want to take a step back and write a little bit about the future and some of the big goals that I’m hoping to tackle within Infrastructure Support over the next couple of years.  These are still somewhat abstract ideas, but I think they will give folks in the Libraries a better idea of what to expect as I work with the Infrastructure Support team, Jennifer, Beth, OCIO, and all of you in the Libraries to move forward together. 

In thinking about my big goals, I’d like to break these down into four core areas: communication, operationalization, project management, and investment.  These are ideas that I’ll be fleshing out with the Infrastructure Support team, but I’m going to talk about my vision within each of these areas and how I believe each of these areas intersects with the Libraries’ strategic goals.

Communication

How we communicate with each other is at the heart of everything that we do.  And if you look closely at the Libraries’ strategic plan, it is the linchpin to the Libraries’ success.  We are at our best when we work together, in partnership, and that requires building trust, engaging with good intentions, being thoughtful and transparent, and engaging fully with our communities.  One of my primary goals this year, and beyond, is to build on the good work that has come before me, and work to model more effective communication between Infrastructure Support and our partners.    These changes will manifest themselves in different ways, as I’ve started thinking about the types of interactions that we want to build between our various stakeholders.  For operational partners like OCIO, it means finding common ground to build the trust and the foundation needed to create vital partnerships that benefit the entire university community.  And I believe this is happening. [1]

Within the Libraries, it means being proactive and consistent in our interactions. The Libraries has several different communication avenues and sometimes, it can feel overwhelming and my intention isn’t to add to this noise.  Rather, I believe in the value of meeting face to face, and I would like to have regular conversations with groups within the Libraries to understand the issues that they are facing and discuss potential projects and partnerships.  There is a significant amount of expertise within the Information Technology units, and my hope is that I can serve as a connector to that talent and help engage Library IT earlier in the Libraries’ project planning process.    

Operationalization

One area that I feel like I could learn a great deal from my colleague, Beth Snapp, is around the development and clear definition of service portfolios.  Like many groups within the Libraries, the types and scope of services that Infrastructure Support are tasked with managing has continued to expand – and in some areas, the team currently isn’t structured in a way to support this expanding vision efficiently.  In order to help our Library colleagues envision and develop new services – we need to take a hard look at how we manage our own work and really ask questions around what we are supporting and why.  In Infrastructure Support, there is a strong desire to do this work…to develop for ourselves and our partners, a clear description of the work that we do and support.  And this isn’t something that happens in a vacuum – but will be done in cooperation with library stakeholders and the Executive team to understand where we, as a Libraries, also have the most critical needs. 

This area of focus is really about taking a critical look at the work that we do and identifying our entire service portfolio and then bringing that work into alignment with the Libraries’ strategic goals…and, if necessary, helping the Libraries understand our current limitations given available resources.

Project Management

I’m a big believer in strong project management and developing a long-term vision or roadmap for the work that we do.  I’ve seen how successful this can be working with AD&S and how these kinds of efforts lead to greater transparency and successful projects.  It is my hope that as all of the Libraries’ IT continues to work more closely together, that we can develop a shared value around project management and create a unified vision and road map that will enable all of Library IT to move together.  This is work that my colleague, Beth Snapp has been a strong advocate for, and I believe that we have an opportunity to make this happen.  I believe that our success as a group long-term, will ultimately hinge on our ability to make this transition to a more managed project approach as we take on a wide range of complicated projects like the network migration, annual security reporting/audit, etc.

Investment

Finally, I believe that we need to invest in all our Information Technology staff.  The OSUL continues to become a more complex and diverse technical environment.  Whether we are thinking about personal devices (PCs, iPad, laptops, etc.) and the specialized software and needs of faculty and staff, to issues related to preservation and access, to server and container management, to combating cybersecurity threats and ensuring a safe computing environment – Libraries in general are complicated IT operations.  Some of this complexity is tied up in the mission (diversity of users, faculty research needs, long-term preservation, etc.) of the Libraries, and some is simply related to the speed at which technology shifts and changes.  To ensure that the Libraries is best positioned to meet these needs, we must invest in staff to not only learn new skills, but to engage in the broader IT community around new technologies so that we can anticipate, rather than react, to changes.  The new strategic plan specifically highlights the need to support this kind of life-long learning to ensure that staff can continue to grow professionally, but I’d also argue that it’s in the Libraries’ best interests to aggressively support staff learning, as it helps to guarantee that the skill sets found in the Libraries’ continues to evolve as well.

Wrapping Up

When I look at this list, some of these are big an ambitious goals and mirror work being done in many units around the Libraries.  These won’t happen overnight, but they are guide posts that I hope we can follow as an organization and unit.  It’s my hope that by sharing these goals, two things will happen.  First, that it creates a level of accountability.  I’m making a commitment to work on these areas together and if I’m failing short of these expectations, I want to know.  Secondly, I think its healthy for these kinds of discussions to be had in the open and this is where I think we need to be going as a Library and organization.

As I said above, these thoughts are still somewhat abstract.  As I work with Infrastructure Support and our stakeholders to give these ideas more form, I’ll periodically checkback in.  Until then, if you have any questions or comments, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Best,

–tr

[1] OSUL/OCIO Network Partnership: https://library.osu.edu/site/it/osulocio-network-partnership/

On the Lighter-side: Server Management

September 13, 2018 / / Comments Off on On the Lighter-side: Server Management

Encourage.exe

From: https://raphcomic.com/

Agile with a capital A

August 8, 2014 / / Comments Off on Agile with a capital A

One of the many corporate buzzwords that we have been hearing over the past couple years is “agile:” “we want to be an agile organization.” Like “innovative” and “empowered,” I believe that “agile” is losing its intended meaning. I’m starting to cringe when I hear it. I’m worried that an effect of this management-speak is that its overuse will trivialize a powerful software development methodology called Agile. I have heard organizational leaders describe how they have adopted agile software development: “we have agile software developers; see, we’re an agile organization.” Do these leaders understand Agile as a methodology?

The values of Agile software development include responsiveness to change, face-to-face communication, and iterative and incremental delivery. We can all certainly benefit from being more agile (with a lower-case “a”). Doing Agile involves a little more than adopting a set of values (although that goes a long way culturally). Take Scrum–the most popular Agile framework. It is structured, empirical, and adaptive with defined rules, roles, events, and deliverables, and it’s been around since 1986. Many IT organizations have successfully adopted Scrum techniques and have increased productivity and shortened release cycles. It would be a shame if we started equating Agile with the buzzword “agile” and dismissed Agile software development out of hand as the latest management fad. The commercialization of these open frameworks is not helping the situation. Perhaps it’s time for a new label for Agile software development.

–Beth Snapp

450,000 Early Journal Articles made freely available

April 12, 2013 / / Comments Off on 450,000 Early Journal Articles made freely available

One of the most exciting things happening around academic research is the freeing of scholarly content.  Libraries certainly are playing a part, working with their faculty to understand and embrace open access/open science and continue to advocate for publications models that include an avenue that supports making scholarship freely available.  And in many places, faculty are.  Libraries certainly are playing a role — and are playing a role here at The Ohio State University.  Programs like the Knowledge Bank (http://kb.osu.edu — currently ranked #17 for North American repositories [4/1/2013 — http://repositories.webometrics.info/en/North_america]) and it’s tremendous staff provide faculty with help navigating their publication rights and provide a platform for publishing their scholarship in an open venue.  These programs make a difference — by opening up scholarly research, they provide opportunities not only for citizen researchers, but for researchers around the world who may not have the opportunity to work at an institution as well resourced as The Ohio State University.  And as a land grant institution for the state of Ohio, and an institution with a vision of being a land grant institution for the whole world, I’d argue that we have an obligation to ensure that OSU sponsored research is as open and available as possible.

Continue reading

Thinking about what’s not being measured by the Ithaka S+R Survey

April 11, 2013 / / 1 Comment

I’ve been doing some thinking on the latest release of the Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey 2012 (http://www.sr.ithaka.org/research-publications/us-faculty-survey-2012).  The survey represents a long-running attempt to measure the attitudes and practices of U.S. research faculty.  In previous cycles, the survey has been used to examine long-term trends regarding how research faculty views the library and their role in relationship to their research.  The survey has also examined faculty research patterns and the shifting role that academic libraries play in a faculty member’s research process.

To say that the Ithaka S+R survey has been influential on libraries would be an understatement.  In 2009, when the previous survey was compiled, a very real and troubling trend for libraries regarding the erosion of the library as an important information gateway for researchers was significantly highlighted.  In 2009, faculty responses seemed to indicate an accelerated trend away from the library as an information gateway.  Research faculty were finding better and more comprehensive discovery tools in places like Google Scholar or Microsoft’s Academic Search, relegating libraries to more of an after-thought.  And libraries listened…over the past 3 years, libraries have invested heavily in new discovery tools and technologies.  Likewise, library software vendors invested heavily in research and development, and working with academic content providers developed significantly better discovery tools like Summons and Primo allowing library users the ability to query a much more comprehensive set of a libraries’ research holdings.  Spring forward to 2012 and it appears that these investments have started to pay off.  For the first time in 9 years, faculty perceptions of the library as a starting point for research actually gained ground.  This is one of a number of examples where this survey has shaped how libraries have evolved their services to meet their faculty’s research needs.

However, reading through the 2012 Ithaka S+R study, I’m struck by how out of date the survey feels to me.  Don’t get me wrong, there is still a lot of good stuff here – but the study focuses primarily on traditional publishing and traditional library services (journal collections/ILL).  While some questions nibble around the edges of the libraries role in the digital education space, by and large, the survey measures faculty perceptions around research journals and their availability.  It’s a study that frames libraries primarily as information repositories and ignores the contributions libraries are making to scholarly research as partners in the research process.  As someone whose primary interests revolve around what many would call digital initiatives, what I find lacking in this study is a look at how libraries are positioning themselves as partners and data creators, rather than simply as the storehouse of data when the research is completed.  Libraries continue to mine their special and unique collections to make that information available to researchers around the world, they support visualization services, are creating large sets of bibliographic and research data for mining, championing open access to ensure easier access to materials for their faculty, and strive to democratize specialized technology to encourage greater interdisciplinary research between faculty and institutions.  What’s more, libraries have become research incubators themselves, working with large digital humanities datasets to develop new and innovative ways to build relationships between various disciplines and research, as well as creating new data mining tools and techniques that can be repurposed in other disciplines.

Beyond their work with primary resources, academic libraries are at the forefront in partnering with digital humanities faculty to reboot academic publishing.  Libraries and University Presses are working hard to redefine what it means to publish, and how the dynamic nature of the Internet and electronic media to support a more interactive publication model.  Working with digital humanities faculty, many libraries are working to disassemble the book or article, and reimagine it as something else entirely.

I guess, the point that I’m trying to make is that while the Ithaka S+R study provides some very important insights into how faculty view the library and its services, it offers a very old world view of the library.  And from that perspective, some of the trends outlining faculty perceptions around the importance of the academic library to their research is not entirely surprising.  While the survey has attempted to reconcile its questions to reflect the changing nature of a faculty member’s research environment, the survey has failed to recognize that the academic library has evolved as well, leaving us with a very incomplete view of faculty perceptions.  It will be interesting to see in 2015, if the Ithaka S+R study continues to address this very traditional view of library services or if it will present faculty a more contemporary view of where academic libraries are today.

January 13, 2013

A public library is the most enduring of memorials, the trustiest monument for the preservation of an event or a name or an affection; for it, and it only, is respected by wars and revolutions, and survives them.
Mark Twain

Recent Posts

Archives 

Categories  

The Ohio State University

© 2024 The Ohio State University - University Libraries

1858 Neil Avenue Mall, Columbus, OH 43210

Phone: (614) 292-OSUL (6785)

Request an alternate format of this page | Accessibility | Privacy Policy | Contact Us | Creative Commons

Copyright Information | Details and Exceptions

Up ↑