The Applications Development & Support team (AD&S) has been making the most of our teleworking, while keeping spirits up with an informal chat channel, attending virtual social events, pair programming, and personal lunches. We hope you are all finding ways to keep connected with your colleagues.
We’ve been able to help the organization be responsive to changes due to the pandemic, but also in response to the move to Workday. We helped the Communications team remove the Exhibits section from the homepage in favor of a Resources section. We added links to the HathiTrust Emergency Temporary Access Service to corresponding materials in Discover and helped Circulation enable the Study Rooms Reservation system for the Contact-free Pickup service. We reconfigured the Sierra Patron Load service in response to changes in the PeopleSoft data sources, and worked with Michelle Henley and the Business Office to develop a prototype for transforming purchasing data from Sierra into a format that the WorkDay system can parse.
We also completed much of the work we’d been planning for the year. In partnership with the Metadata Initiatives team, we developed a much-needed bulk edit system for the Digital Collections (DC) system, and have been supporting them with their massive task of uploading preservation copies of the Lantern into that system. The Discover system saw the addition of ConnectWith for Subject Liaisons, updates to the Website bento (including Staff Directory) and an Advanced Search functionality across the different sources. For our part in the University’s select migration to Amazon Web Services (AWS), we implemented some Password and User Management tools and other systems for monitoring and managing our systems through logs and performance metrics.
We have several longer-term and slower projects that we’ve been working on, but not completed. These include a Faculty Publications page, examining Archival Storage solutions, some styling changes to the Catalog interface, and preparation for a Special Collections Registry refresh. Most of these will still be active in the next quarter, along with some polish on the Sierra Patron Load, improvements to the Bulk Import module for the DC, and more AWS migrations.
I also want to highlight the crucial everyday things that we do to keep things in good working order, secure, and accessible. We do updates to hardware, firmware, virtual layers, operating systems, service software, third party modules, and our own code. We are actively learning about and testing for security vulnerabilities, usability deficiencies, and accessibility flaws. We hope that we are also keeping on top of the myriad little disruptions that our parters are having – thanks for your patience and especially for reporting issues!
On behalf of AD&S,
Russell
