Happy Summer!
Applications Development & Operations planned a Quarter of Discovery – a series of major changes to Discover, but mostly changes that aren’t visible to most folks. Before we started that however, we had a few things from the first quarter to wrap up. We did the final tweaks we needed to do to launch the Special Collections Registry updates. We launched the major upgrades for the Digital Collections bulk import functionality.
D2 Cloud
This project moves the Discover application from our existing on-premises VMWare infrastructure to our Amazon Web Services platform. We didn’t take that extra set of plates to the thrift store, but we have been taking the opportunity to consolidate our code, tighten up our indexing, and improve our start-up and logging. It is running great on our test instance and we plan to launch soon. With any luck, you won’t notice a thing!
Discover Subject Guides
We have been developing a Discover search against the titles of our Librarians’ Subject Guides and including them at the top of the search results. This is in testing by our partners and should be ready for Fall Semester.
Digital Accessibility for Discover
We’ve been redesigning the User Experience in Discover for visitors using screen readers. This is still in progress, but we’ve better labeled navigation elements and screen regions so that it is easier to understand where you are and navigate to where you’d like to go next. We’ve also refined the user interface to be better for folks using smaller mobile screens. These are incremental steps in our Digital Accessibility journey, so look forward to seeing more updates about this exciting work.
AWS Migration
Other projects that we’re doing in our on-going cloud infrastructure migration include:
- Wrapping up our data backup strategy (S3),
- Making our jump host more secure,
- Migrating to an improved production cluster,
- Preparing a gateway server (1web)
- Designing a implementation of our single-sign-on (Shibboleth)
- Refining our log monitoring systems for security and performance monitoring
Else
No, not the Ice Princess❄️, the other things we worked on!
Security patches, TX hangs, planning updates to Jira and Confluence, WordPress plugin Updates, accessibility changes in the Catalog, getting ready for adding Room Reservations to OSU Mobile application, lots of security monitoring, risk assessment, php upgrades, hiring committees, and Step3 evaluations!
