Information Technology

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!

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

This final quarter of 2020 was focused on several large projects continuing towards completion. SCR2020 and DC (below) are both expected to be ready for testing and deploy in the next quarter.

The Special Collections Registry refresh (SCR2020) is putting the final polish on the UI changes before enlisting another round of User Experience (UX) testers. Changes include a menu revision and swapping the User Interface framework, which should ease some of the minor-but-annoying problems confronting users.

We’ve been rebuilding the Bulk Import functionality for the Digital Collections (DC) system, improving reliability and making it more clear to the operator how things are progressing as the Metadata Initiatives team populates this registry.

Many groups on campus have been preparing for the WorkDay(WD) transition, and we have a few projects to contribute. We’ve re-fit our PatronLoad system (Patronage) to use the new WD data feeds to populate our list of Patrons in the Sierra catalog. We also created a job aid that transforms Sierra materials invoices into a format that can be imported into WD.

Our migration to a cloud infrastructure has continued as well – deployment workflow details, network and internetwork connections, and refinement of our methods to better align with our ideals of consistency.

We have also been actively honing our information security preparedness, both from actively scanning and patching vulnerabilities, to more long-term efforts of becoming more deliberate in our workflows.

This was also a quarter where we were able to take advantage of virtual conference and training opportunities: Cybersecurity Days, KubeConf, VueConf Toronto, LMSI iii, and certification for Digital Accessibility Manual Training.

There are lots of other things that we did too, like procuring and installing the hardware for the Sierra update, but I’m sure you get the idea by now. 

Sorry to disappoint our readers, but the normal summer tales of Application Development & Operations (AD&O) have been postponed for reasons. Check back next year for the results of our Yachting Regatta, pictures of our Beach Blanket Blowout, and the winning tale from our Campfire Ghosts contest. In the meantime, here are some more mundane matters.

Upgrades

Operations seeks to be good stewards of our systems. Our Reduce, Rebuild, and Retire program has greatly simplified our database servers, placed us on updated Operating Systems, the latest WordPress, and created even more scripts for monitoring, administrating, and reporting on our systems. Sometimes though, we just have to buy new hardware; we are working to specify, purchase and install new servers for an upcoming Sierra upgrade.

WD-EIB

In preparation for the move to WorkDay, AD&O has been working closely with Michelle Henley and folks in the Business Office to build a system to transform materials purchases recorded in Sierra into a format that can be uploaded into WorkDay, matching funds codes, purchase amounts, and titles of materials purchased. This system will be going into production for an October 15 go-live date.

SCR2020

We have been working with Halle Mares and Susan Liberator to do a critical evaluation of the Special Collections Registry from a researcher standpoint.  Together, we developed methodologies, recruiting strategies, and evaluated  the initial User Experience (UX) test sessions. These sessions immediately illuminated several actionable issues. We’ve started these changes and some internal updates, and will be garnering feedback, doing more UX testing, and hope to deploy the changes later in the last quarter of 2020.

Digital Collections

We have continued our intensive partnership with the Metadata Initiatives team, including a few catch-up items from the Bulk Edit project, troubleshooting some issues with handle creation, and minor UI fixes. We’ve also started a project to overhaul the Bulk Import module; since we initially developed it about five years ago, we’ve seem substantial changes to the type and content of what is being ingested. We were initially supporting imports of a few spreadsheet pages of scans by the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, now the system is hosting audio and video files as well as thousands of Lantern pages. We’re examining the code for ways to simplify, add feedback mechanisms, and optimize operations so it takes just as long as it needs to take, and no more. This work will last through most if not all of the Fall quarter.

Cloud Infrastructure

We’re continuing our journey of migrating systems to cloud based hosting — it makes sense for us fiscally and strategically. We moved the Special Collections Registry to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and are evaluating it for affordable backup solutions. We’re very interested in using a container paradigm to make it easier for us to manage, scale and develop against. This is a major move for us, so we’re going to keep talking about it for a while!

Et Cetera

Other tasks include participating in our Information Security audit, improving our Digital Accessibility expertise, developing notifications for the Patron Load process, minor website changes and troubleshooting, and some accessibility fixes. We are actively updating our Disaster Recovery plan, not ruling out Kaiju attack after this year.

Thanks for reading! Please let us know if you have any questions, concerns, or ideas.
Russell

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

Cloud Computing

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

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

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

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

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!

Libraries IT has been working closely with the Archival Description & Access team to develop the latest iteration of the Special Collections Registry (SCR). This project is the next step in bringing all of the curation, preservation, digitization, and description work into a single location for patrons to research our distinctive collections at OSUL. SCR’s new design now better reflects the users’ journey of orientation, exploration, and action.  

What Has Changed

• We improved the layout and navigation of collection container lists to help patrons better see the relationships between context and content.
• For each collection, we provide information about similar collections, related digital collections, and cataloged materials to show the linkages among OSUL’s holdings.
• We make it easier for patrons to contact curatorial staff via email from within each collection.

Benefits For The Researchers

• Patrons will find it easier to browse and search our collections and to understand the scope and use of them.
• With information from various systems better integrated, it will be easier and require less expertise to navigate collection materials.
• Patrons will have clear direction on how to request more information from OSUL staff.

Benefits For OSUL

As a cultural heritage and land-grant institution, OSUL has the clear responsibility to provide easy and open access to our holdings. This system continues to demonstrate the value of our investments in content and description by making it easier for researchers to find our materials for their work.

Check It Out

This major iteration will be deployed at 5:00 pm on April 23, April 25, 2019, during IT’s weekly planned maintenance window.

To experience SCR, simply search in Discover and select from the results in the Special Collections bento, or you can navigate directly to: https://library.osu.edu/collections. 

Questions?

For more information or assistance or to provide feedback, please contact OSUL’s Service Desk at: https://library.osu.edu/hub.

Digital Collections

We launched the new version of Digital Collections on Hyrax. The purpose of the project was to upgrade the software, not necessarily make modifications to functionality. Unfortunately, we realized that the new image server was not going to work out as planned and had to do some rollback to Loris. There was also some data and permission cleanup which is not unexpected after a big upgrade. We will continue to tweak the bulk import functionality in the coming weeks. 

Cloud Computing

While our current VMWare server architecture has been serving us faithfully for several years now, it is time to look into cloud computing options. To this end, we’ve been exploring Amazon Web Services, offered via the OCIO, and implementing Docker and Kubernetes. As always, the promise of ease always comes with the need to develop expertise to meet the challenges of a complex environment. We’ve made considerable progress in learning the new technologies and have selected pilot applications to be deployed soon. 

Discover

At the beginning of this quarter we moved the Discover system into the primary spot. Since then we’ve had over 250,000 unique sessions – folks using this to mostly find journal articles and catalog materials, but also special collections materials and library web pages.

Through our User Experience partnership with Michelle Henley, who designed and ran dozens of user feedback sessions, we developed many ideas that we thought might improve the patron experience. Some went very well, like the Peer Reviewed and Full Text filters on the Articles+ bento, and some were returned back to the board for more research. We’ve also done some back-end work to improve the performance, as well as installing some performance monitoring software and will continue to explore many other ideas in the coming months.

Special Collections Registry

Codenamed ACE (Amalgamated Collections Experience™) we’ve been developing an upgrade for the Special Collections Registry that will help patrons navigate various sources of collection information – Finding Aids, Digital Collections, Sierra, etc. We’ve presented it to some partners to get their feedback to make some changes, and also have been using it as a pilot for some new Test-running software. We also used Postman to create a fake API, which sounds pretty cool. We’ll be deploying it to production very soon!

Room Reservation System

We are working with the OCIO Web and Mobile team to provide access to room reservations in The Ohio State App. Room Reservations is one of our most popular systems, so we are excited to provide an Application Protocol Interface to allow users of their app to reserve rooms. Along the way it was great to get fresh eyes on the system and we were able to make some important improvements to our user interface. We are looking forward to seeing this interface in action very soon.

Miscellaneous

We like to talk about our big projects, but we also have lots of smaller tasks that fill a good portion of our days. Some of these are (thankfully!) invisible, behind-the-scenes work, but they are all important.

• We migrated our team from HipChat to Slack
• We updated our InUse application to reflect changes in workstation systems
• We welcomed Chris Bartos to the Application Development team
• We kept the ball rolling on our hosted Drupal solution (Pantheon)
• We polished our Nagios monitoring and alert system
• We updated some Research Commons data sets with newly available data
• We (Fortunate Phoebe!) attended the List Apart web development conference
• We started a program of reviewing FullStory recordings for UX improvements
• We finished (a very long) process of migrating Accessions data from ASpace to Archivists’ Toolkit
• We helped create web pages for the IDEAL19 conference in August
• We developed some specialized User Interface concepts for our ILMS patron interface
• We worked continuously to keep our systems updated, available, and secure

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.

This finishes up a great year for us, we hope that we are providing the organization with value representative with the resources entrusted with us. If you have questions about specific projects, we’ve put together a matrix of who to contact. Happy New Year on behalf of Applications Development & Support – Russell

Group Study Room Reservation System

This last quarter of 2017 we have made lots progress on the new Room Reservation System and are ready to see the fruits. The new Study Room Reservation system is live, December 20, 2017. We’ve incorporated lots of feedback from patrons, administrators, and our stakeholders to make a new system that will perform quicker, be easier to use on mobile and touchscreen devices, and have multiple options for finding a room including natural language processing!

Digital Collections Upgrade

In 2017Q4 we’ve done some preliminary work in planning an upgrade for our Digital Collections system. It has only been just over a year since we finished our last upgrade, but so much has changed in that software stack. We will be updating to the latest stable versions of:

• Fedora repository software
• Postgres database software
• Samvera (fka. Hydra) communications layer
• Hyrax (replacing Sufia) administrative layer
• PCDM models – doing any migrations that might need to be made to support new features

This will likely carry over into the second quarter. We will start with a careful comparison of software features and our requirements. This will inform the path that we take to install, configure, and migrate data. We are hoping that most if not all of our needs will be covered by the software in its ‘natural’ state and reduce the amount of customization that we had to do in the past.

Discovery

We have made lots of progress on the Discovery system that will eventually be the primary search tool on the OSU Libraries web site. We have been testing an initial version with Libraries staff and will continue into January. Our goal is to have it in a state that it can be an option for patrons to use in 2018Q1. This will clearly be labeled as a Beta service and will have clear options for providing feedback and easily returning to our primary systems.

In addition to revisions based on feedback, we will also be working on faceting search results, adding Journals & Databases, working on how to present other spheres, i.e. OhioLINK and the World. We will also be exploring how to surface researcher expertise and what we’re calling a “Best Guess” functionality. After these we’ll be looking at customizing search results based on where a query was entered, e.g. from a particular unit.

Website Redesign

In 2017Q4 we continued our design and implementation of the Libraries website. We relied on close partnership with our Product Owner and the content development team to help guide what we worked on and how it took shape. We decided to do what I think of as a shadow roll-out; Content is being published on a beta website, shadowing the primary site. Both sites will run in parallel until we have the complete functionality for patrons.

The first section that went up on the beta site was the About Us section, mostly with pages for each division. This gave us a chance to look at navigation, styles on the page and getting a system up and running for folks to look at and a mechanism for folks to leave feedback with.

For the next quarter, we’ll be working on Bios, a Directory, Forms, helping the content team as they work through the other sessions. We’ll be extending design elements into some other OSUL web presences (e.g. Finding Aids, Blogs). We’ll also be implementing changes based on feedback though out the quarter, so please be sure to let us know what you think.

Other Projects 2018Q1

• SCDA Data Migrations
• Byrd North Pole Digital Exhibit
• DSpace Upgrade
• Room Schedule Display in Thompson
• Drupal and WordPress to Pantheon hosting
• Application health and security monitoring tools
• UseResponse Customer Survey Software implementation