AWS
Our ongoing project to migrate our systems to Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues. This quarter we put into place some of the gears and gadgets that make up a server ecosystem: backups, load balancer, centralized logging, a storage gateway, an updated network map, and a Shibboleth server. We spent a good deal of time refining our configuration and deploy techniques for the new systems and were able to move a great deal of our backup and storage to the cloud. We have much of the groundwork laid to begin bringing more applications over; Discover is one, in the second quarter.
SCR2020
The Special Collections Registry (SCR) user interface changes have been completed and placed on a demonstration server. A second round of User Experience(UX) confirmed many of our changes and suggest a few more minor ones. We are planning a roll-out and demonstration on April 29, 2021. Some of the changes you’ll see: a tabbed view, fewer navigation groupings, and a search box that performs finds within the frequently expansive Collection Inventory.
DC Imports
Improvements to the Digital Collections (DC) system to bring large numbers of digital items and their metadata into our digital repository. This module that we build several years ago on the original instance has had things added to it, turned off, forgotten… it was not performing as well as we’d like. Now was a good time to restructure the import mechanisms, improve the metadata ‘proofing’ steps, and make the processes more robust. We’re currently testing this and hope to deploy it in April 2021.
Drupal
We have been actively maintaining our Drupal site and adding a few new features: allowing staff to expand their job titles into versions more readable than the HR system version and a Digital Exhibits content type. We also pushed the Faculty Publications page which promotes our work, and modified the home page to have an Experiences block.
Digital Accessibility
Our team has always been interested in and responsible for Digital Accessibility, but were able to level up our game thanks to newly available University-provided training. The tools and techniques that we learned will allow us to better integrate better design principles into our everyday work that make our services better for everyone.
Patronage
We had some follow-up work on Patronage, our service which pulls data from University HR systems and creates files which can be imported into Sierra to keep our Patron roles current. The WorkDay migration at the beginning of the year prompted some additional changes that we needed to make and surfaced some discussions on the provider side as well. We took the opportunity to simplify the process, solve some outstanding issues, and streamline the overall procedure.
Else
Along with our regular maintenance, upgrade, and troubleshooting work, we
- Assisted with the Sierra migration to new hardware,
- Participated in major network hardware upgrade
- Researched licensing, purchasing agreements, and new software
- Documented Information System Control Requirements (ISCR) compliance
- Held group discussions of 12 Factor Applications
