July-September, 2018
Here is an overview of what AD&S has been working on this past quarter. Please let us know if you have questions or concerns about something here (or not here), or if you have ideas for a project moving forward, or if you have feedback about this report. Thanks, Russell
Discover
We’ve been working steadily on Discover the past few months, but with a few important exceptions (improved focus navigation) we’ve been doing mostly backend work. Some of it is paying down technical debt, that is, improving some of the code and structure elements that we worked through more quickly than carefully to get a system in place sooner rather than later, much like making a purchase on your credit card, as long as you’re paying down the balance, it is a useful tool.
Some of these improvements are implementing automated testing, continuous integration, combining and refactoring code structures, and separating indexing into configurable units. This last one will be important as we start to dial in the way different bentos return results. We are looking forward to making Discover the primary search tool for our patrons at the break, but we have a few things yet outstanding, most important being helping searchers understand when and how they can get materials from outside OSUL collections.
Digital Collections Upgrade
The DC upgrade to the latest version of the Hyrax software keeps moving steadily along. We’ve been implementing features: OAI/PMH harvesting, metadata labels. We’ve also been improving the systems: continuous integration & testing, and systems containerization. There are also steps that we’ve made to do the actual migration: setting up a new staging environment, building and benchmarking migration scripts. We have evaluated the containerization technology that we were hoping to use, but have decided that it isn’t the right time for us to use it. That said, we’re still on track to complete the migration by the end of the year.
Systems Administration
With the addition of Travis & Eric to our team, we’re going to be trying to highlight some of the absolutely vital things that they’re doing to keep our systems running. They’ve been doing them for years, but now it is my pleasure to try and explain some of them.
This past quarter has had a large project in our Information Security Systems Audit (ISSA). This is something that much of the IT Division has a hand in, but in particular I’m discussing evaluating and reporting on the state of procedures and processes around our applications servers. “How do we keep abreast of patches?”, “How do we restrict access to systems?”, “How do we protect our data?”. Reporting on these isn’t fun, but it does highlight the amount of work that we do every day to keep our systems safe and effective. Many thanks to our Systems Administrators!
Libraries Jobs
We’re not quite ready to move this project into production (November!) but AD&S worked with the HR department to develop a system for managing and publishing Student Jobs, as well as displaying Staff & Faculty jobs from the OSU HR web site. This automation is hopefully going to remove much of the drudgery of web page shuffling and allow staff to better focus on helping the organization being effective. It should also be easier for job seekers to use and provide a better first impression of our team.
Amalgamated Collections Experience™
This project, ACE, is a collaboration between AD&S and SCDA to improve patrons’ online experience with our Special Collections… Collections, particularly in blending the various data sources that OSUL has worked so hard to develop: Archivists Toolkit, Sierra, Digital Collections, Discover. As a team, we developed User Personas and talked about different ways they might come to find and use our collections. We chose “Researchers External to OSU” as an initial foray and then did a deep dive of the journey that user might make in our collections, but then distilled it into three phases: Orientation, Exploration and Action. With these as our waypoints, we developed some initial concepts to make it easy for visitors to know where they are, what is available, and how to move forward with collection materials.
We’ve started working with more stakeholders, particularly Special Collections staff, in order to review our initial efforts and find where we need to make improvements. Once what we have is at least as good as the current Special Collections Registry(SCR), ACE will replace SCR as the public display of Collections information. SCR will still be an important data repository, and will be available to editors and administrators, but will only be visible to patrons through the ACE interface. We expect this to happen sometime before the end of 2018.
Miscellany
We’ve tried to provide some highlights for what we’ve been working on, but we’re only listing two more here. We added Current Initiatives to the website as a part of the effort to highlight how we are achieving our Strategic Directions. We’ve also implemented a Kanban system to help us be more effective in maintaining our non-project and maintenance tasks.
