Fall 2025 Operations & Web Services Report

LibAnswers

A surprising amount of the team's attention continued to be consumed by LibAnswers during the Fall semester – both in its configuration and day-to-day operation. The team found great interest in responding to research queries and LibChat patrons, which is part and parcel of the platform’s ease of use and accessibility.

As discussed in earlier reports, team members have extensive LibAnswers and LibChat experience from their use of it in other libraries, so they were comfortable with the platform at launch. To help share that wisdom, the team assembled a document that would help associates new to LibChat stay on top of the platform and make the most of its many tools. The operations and web services team continues to field questions about how best to leverage the platform in the present.

FAQs Page

In November, the library embarked on a project to update the 80+ Frequently Asked Questions migrated from FreshDesk to LibAnswers so they could be published on the Library’s website. In addition to updating their own set of tickets, the operations and web services team explored the 500-or-so new tickets accrued in the system up to that point and created new FAQs based on that preponderance of repetitive data. A few of those specific Frequently Asked Questions are shown below:

In December, after hours of Library-wide editing had been performed, the team began work on a widget that would act as a search engine for the Library’s Frequently Asked Question database. This widget autocompletes searches based on the natural language terms people use when asking questions. If one were to begin typing “how do I…” or “where can I…” the widget suggests results as the user continues to type. The team’s hope is that having a natural language interface in which to respond to common questions might both improve library experiences for users and lessen the load of responding to repetitive questions by our staff. Feel free to try it out below:

FreshDesk Tickets Export

During the Library’s migration to LibAnswers, the Operations and Web Services team made a plan to migrate tickets from our original system, FreshDesk, to the new platform. This migration of tickets was intended to help system operators acclimate to it by showing familiar content in a new context with new features. As we learned, however, there was no easy way to simply import our content from FreshDesk to LibAnswers. Interestingly enough, by the time that we had some modicum of a displayable ticket from the previous system ready to be ingested into LibAnswers, we had already collected several hundred tickets from pure use of LibAnswers by both patron and staff, signaling to us that the previous body of tickets was of no remaining importance. Furthermore, College-wide initiatives to protect the digital security and anonymity of patrons has reframed this effort as unnecessarily risky.

Tickets from the previous system will still continue to be available to Library Staff until our FreshDesk contract expires in March of this year, at which point we will most likely download all historical data from the system and place it in a secure, non-networked location.

Users Purge

Privacy is a consistent concern among all libraries, and Gottesman is no exception. Indeed, the Library retains as little personally identifying information about our patrons as possible in Alma. We embarked on a mission in the previous academic year to see how far we could push this concept, and successfully collaborated with TCIT to remove physical addresses and all but the most basic contact information from patron records in the platform.

In the Fall semester, the Operations and Web Services team committed to taking that theory once step farther by mastering patron purge processes in Alma, and developing a plan of action to purge over 150,000 old accounts worth of data. That work began in earnest over the intercession period and continues into the present.

Primo NDE

In the background, the Gottesman Libraries staff have been preparing for the introduction of Primo Next Discovery Experience (NDE), an upgrade to the industry standard Primo VE which has been integrated with Alma since 2018 and has been a staple of library services since 2022. The Operations and Web Services Team began building out a test user view of NDE within the Library’s Sandbox environment. The Operations and Web Services Team anticipates gaining significant facility and expertise in the lead up time before the transition becomes official so they can share these skills with the remaining Gottesman staff.

Loan-Request Issue

Naturally, Alma was not without its problems this Fall. Through the keen insights of Circulation staff, we discovered a defect in our borrowing procedures that allowed for items with a request queue behind them to be loaned out as normal rather than to honor the 10-day limit allowed for recalled titles, which is what we expected from the system.

After consulting with Ex Libris, we discovered that we had an unconfigured advanced policy called “Requested Item Due Date” which governs the loan limits of titles borrowed that other users have requested before the loan has begun. This situation is rarer than it may seem on face value, because it requires the loan to begin within the 10-day window between the time a patron has been alerted of the availability of the title and that user actually checking the title out to themselves. Since we observed this exact occurrence, we noticed the defect, and were able to correct it with Ex Libris’ assistance. 

Archivesspace Set Up

Over the Summer, the Library committed itself to hosting our Archivesspace instance via Lyrasis. Employing Lyrasis for this purpose would unburden the TCIT Enterprise Team from having a role in the technical management of database volumes and servers for the Library. This has also enabled us to bypass a world of technical challenges that would’ve unnecessarily delayed our putting archival collections online.

While relieved of those challenges, the Operations and Web Services Team was able to help usher along the technical and intellectual set up process of Archivesspace. In the early weeks of January the Team worked with Lyrasis developers to create a public user interface, a connection to a College-appropriate domain, and the groundwork for an integration with the Library’s Alma instance so users can access records on both platforms.

Accessibility Task Force

The Operations and Web Services Team has represented the Library’s interests on the College-Wide Digital Accessibility Task Force since its inception in the Spring of 2025. The Task Force was assembled in the Spring to help address system-wide concerns about accessibility in the wake of the April 2026 compliance deadline, and over the summer the college hired a consultant to assist in preparing for a college-wide audit of digital assets. The Library is no exception to this, and before the Task Force was even assembled we had even pondered accessibility-related problems attached to Teachers College Digital Collections, which debuted in the Summer of 2023. 

It has been our hope that the Library’s responsibility for providing access to digitized archives and special collections be granted a ‘reasonable accommodation’. After consulting with the College’s digital accessibility consultant in the Fall Semester, we were given assurance that our digital collections fall under this protection, given that they meet specific criteria for their exemption.

Additionally, the consultant advised us on other ways to perform our own in-depth audit of Library web assets, which we will perform in the Spring of 2026.