Cloud Computing

Young woman playfully climbing a tree branch.We have been continuing our path to modernize our infrastructure by moving it to a cloud-based infrastructure, Amazon Web Services in this case. We have been engaging with the AWS consultants that the OCIO has engaged to help us work through the configuration and provisioning. Topics include storage strategies across zones, inter/intra networking, database clusters, log monitoring, and application routing.

Study Rooms Reservation on OSUL Mobile

We have been eagerly looking forward to the fruits of our partnership with the OCIO Mobile team to bring the functionality of the Libraries’ Room Reservation system into the OSU Mobile app. With their different perspectives of the service, we were able to find several improvements to make: load testing to improve performance, eliminating several calls to external servers, and moving reservations to a new system to prevent the rare duplicate hold. In preparation, we successfully moved this critical system to our Cloud Computing infrastructure — /room-reservation is now served from AWS! With the COVID-19 situation the Study Room Reservation system is not being currently used, but we are still making the final arrangements to allow patrons to reserve rooms in the OSU Mobile app.

Discover

Group of young people in matching shirts holding gardening tools.We had several initiatives running concurrently in Discover this quarter. Early in the quarter we released some date selection improvements for the Articles+ content. Later in the quarter we added the Connect With functionality which matches search queries with Libraries employees who have identified themselves as available to discuss those terms. Other options that we have almost completed, but not quite: changes to the Website Results to make it more obvious what type of resource is displayed, including results from the Staff Directory in the Website Results, improving the reindexing to drastically reduce the computational resource needed to index bibligraphic records. These were delayed for various reasons, but we are looking for them in the fist part of the coming quarter.

Libraries Catalog

To improve the consistency for visitors as they navigate Libraries web presences, we implemented new header and footer styling on the Sierra web interface. As part of that process, we created a code repository to better track changes to the catalog styles. This has started us on a journey to clean up how that code is organized. Also looking forward, we started some designs for the Database page, still one of our most used web resources.

Workday Migration

Young people in matching shirts picking up plastic bottles off of the ground.We built a prototype of a transformation tool for exporting invoices from Sierra so that they can be brought into the Workday system. Many thanks to our Library and Workday partners for helping us work through the Sierra data and the Workday data. We expect that there will be changes as details are ironed out, but this is a strong first iteration of a bridge between the systems.

Security Policies & Procedures

In addition to the myriad patches and updates that we routinely do to keep our systems defended against intrusion, we have been systematically working with Jason Kolhepp and the OCIO Security team to improve our Information Security policies and procedures. We’ve taken advantage of OCIO security scans to identify and mitigate some security concerns. We’ve also been updating our procedures to align with best practices for centralized logging and change management.

Digital Collections

Young man picking up litter from the ground.

We upgraded the Hyrax software that runs our Digital Collections system. We have been doing some large batch edits for our partners in Metadata Initiatives, but we have a project this coming quarter to enable them to perform these changes without our intervention. This and some changes to the bulk import comprise a large amount of work in the coming months.

Miscellany

Young people in matching shirts posing for a photograph in and on a tree.Congratulations to Michelle Henley and Phoebe Kim in their presentation at the Design4Digital conference, UX is Negotiation: Getting to Yes: (One Sprint at a Time). Unfortunately they had to blaze the trail for folks who have had to present and attend conferences remotely.

We also bid farewell to Jason Michel after several years of toil together. He has moved on to new challenges in a non-scholastic setting and we wish him all the best. As a signifier of his dedication, he hustled to get us on the latest major version of Drupal before he moved on so that we’d be better able to support our website. Thanks Jason!