The Fall 2024 Operations and Web Services Report
The Fall 2024 mostly concerned assessment and planning for the Operations and Web Services Team. Because of the sheer volume of projects taken on in the Spring and Summer, some time needed to be dedicated to simply reflecting on completed work and seeing what was and wasn’t working.
Average Daily Visitors: 672
Self-Bookable Room Bookings: 3232
Large Room Bookings: 81
Seat Bookings: 677
eBook Investigations: 308716
eBook Downloads: 215562
Website Pageviews: 70801
Ad Hoc Technology Initiatives
Upon successful installation, implementation, and visual optimization of new e-boards on all three floors of the Library, we discussed potential audio functions that could further service patron needs. Liaising heavily with TCIT for backend design and support, we launched a “closing song” pilot week to signal the closing hour to attendees. After feedback from patrons, the initial mainstream song choice, “Closing Time,” was received as too loud and disruptive. We then updated to include a more melodic, lyric-free option that more seamlessly blends in the background, conducive to quieter spaces. After TCIT deployed a pilot on the first floor e-board, we approached Winter Intersession ironing out any programming kinks, and now the newly chosen song is played on every floor per closing schedule accordingly.
Additionally, the Library invested in two new treadmills to replace older models. Unfortunately, hardware and software issues persisted upon receiving defective products after months of backorder. The new consoles have had multiple errors, potentially due to electrical issues, but we continue to work with vendor’s maintenance to service, in the hopes of fixing products for patron usage. To avoid any confusion, “out of order” signage was placed at machines, and affected individual seat reservations were taken offline.
Adjusting Loan Periods
Later in the semester, a concern was raised from the Reference and Readers Services Department about a chronic request from borrowers of reserve titles: the ability to take a reserve title borrowed late in the day home overnight and return them in the morning. The logic of this request holds that a two-hour loan borrowed within an hour of closing ought to be due back within the first hour of the library’s opening the following day. Reserve borrowing workarounds like this have been adopted in many academic libraries already, and we were enthusiastic about adopting it ourselves. This loan policy has been in effect since mid-November.
Assessing Reservable Spaces
Confusion about the new check-in protocol for reservations spread almost as soon as the start of the Fall semester. Various librarians noted tickets come in about missed reservations that users hoped would be reinstated and found themselves powerless to assist. After several months of this, we conferred on the topic of whether or not to simply remove the check-in protocol of the reservation system. It was then decided in a meeting of the Reference and Readers Services Working Group that instead of removing the check-in protocol altogether, we would reduce the length of time in which patrons receive automated reminder emails about their reservations from 24 hours to just 2 hours. It has yet to be seen whether or not the more immediate reminders have had an effect on users’ propensity to check-in for their reservations.
Digital Collections Accessibility
Another area of concern was the Library’s custodianship over inaccessible documents in Alma Digital, its digital collections repository. Many documents in the repository arrived there via migration from PocketKnowledge, the Library’s in-house system developed by EdLab. With well over a decade in operation, documents were often uploaded to PocketKnowledge by untrained users without optical character recognition (OCR) software. That accrual accounts for nearly 115,000 such documents that now live in Alma Digital, and which must somehow be treated for OCR. Moreover, the Library has committed to the Office of Access and Services for Individuals with Disabilities that the deficit would be repaired within two years.
This most likely would involve downloading the items from the interface or from the remote storage system behind it, processing the item, and returning it to its proper location. The Operations and Web Services Team estimates that such a process best be carried out via a series of scripted automations involving the application programming interfaces (APIs) behind Alma and OCR softwares like ABBYY Finereader and the aforementioned Adobe Acrobat. Over the summer, the team requested support on this project from TCIT, and we await further consultation from them. This remains an ongoing background concern for the Operations and Web Services team as we continue to make accessibility a priority for the Library.
New Interfaces
One modest success from the team was the final publication of the Interactive Map of the Library’s first floor in October. Users booking a seat or space on the first floor may now see the location of their booking via the map link in the confirmation email of their booking, and may access the map on the Library Spaces page. We look forward to eventually creating more visual cues on the first floor to give life to the map, and are considering expansions of the project to the second and third floors.
Another new Web Services and Operations team innovation was our re-organization of our Databases A-Z page, which now features icons for different categories of database content, such as streaming video, children’s literature, government documents, e-books, and much more. This index now serves as the sole information hub for the Library’s databases. This effort was a collaboration between the Technical Services and Reader and Reference Services departments.
Reference Systems
A big area of concern of the Team was and continues to be the Library’s reference handling systems. By this we mean the backend systems with which we describe and categorize interactions at different access points in the Library. These access points include our chat system, the Services Desk, the “Ask a Librarian” interface, and all varieties of research consultations. Traditionally, the library has recorded these interactions via a number of different systems. For example, questions asked at the Services desk are recorded in a Google Form, but questions asked via the “Ask a Librarian” interface are recorded in a wholly separate queue in a program called FreshDesk.
Members of this team have noted for several semesters that a great deal of the library’s service value is stored in these reference transactions. In order to access more details about those transactions at each location, the team arrived at a solution for moving forward in two stages: first, to consolidate all transactions into a single, readable list; and second, to enrich the metadata applied to these transactions to draw a wider set of conclusions from them. Because FreshDesk provided the most room to describe reference transactions, we ultimately chose that to be the targeted system in which to consolidate other reference traffic queues.
Since consolidating the queues would require a more extensive and likely permanent change, we decided to tackle the second stage first. After extensive analysis of all of the queues, we devised an extended descriptive metadata schema to be used in FreshDesk. We also wrote automations into FreshDesk that would have allowed for Library Associates who operate the Services Desk to easily assign metadata to transactions with just a few clicks, allowing for a near-seamless transition from the pre-existing Google Form system to the proposed workflow. Unfortunately, the proposed changes failed to gain support in the Reference and Reader Services Working Group, and work on the project has been on pause since September.
Subject Term Crosswalks
The team looks forward to continued collaboration with fellow departments as we consider the Library’s rapidly aging authority records and overall metadata schema for web-based content. In the latter category, we’ve already begun by researching the function of subjects in Research Guides as they display in Educat+. We discovered that terms used to categorize Research Guides appear as linkable subject headings in the catalog by way of a Dublin Core-MARC translation written into the discovery import profile. Through this, we have the power to rewrite our Research Guide subjects to allow users to link out to other resources described by high relevance terms.
In order to assess the relevance of these terms, we chose a group of Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) relevant to each program area for which we offer a Research Guide. We then checked those headings against our holdings in the catalog by both direct searches and by running analytics reports on each term. After finding a relevant heading for each Guide, we then wrote them into our LibGuides Subject schema, and re-ran a test version of the import profile to see the magic of subject heading links populate in a live, usable instance of the catalog. The team looks forward to continuing to assess subject terms as the bridges they form between resources.
