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
