Sept 2019 ULMS Update

Project Management

• We enjoyed a successful and well-attended Summer Meeting on Aug 8. Many thanks to the hosts at Northridge, to those of you who presented and especially those of you who took time out of your schedule to come to the meeting. Recordings from the meeting may be found on Confluence.

  • A special thanks to those who attended and provided feedback through the post-meeting survey. The summarized results have been shared with COLD and the ULMS Steering Committee for use in future meeting planning.

• We are now in the last year of the initial five-year term of our contract with Ex Libris, and will be looking to renew the contract in June. Keep an eye out for surveys and other opportunities to share your impressions of Alma and Primo today for use in these discussions.

• The development partnership with Ex Libris on the next-generation resource sharing system, Rapido, has begun. The CSU has five campuses participating, and there are an equal number of other partners from outside the CSU also participating. More information will be shared when applicable.

• We will be meeting with Ex Libris executives in early October to discuss these upcoming projects and other issues.

Analytics

Working Group

• Analytics drop-in labs at Summer Meeting were successful. Based on feedback, will explore different approaches to integrate analytics into the tracks more tightly

• COUNTER 5 support still planned to be added in Alma in Jan 2020. Task Force is working on documentation to help campuses handle the transition when support arrives.

• Along with curation guidelines for existing and migrated data we will be evaluating SUSHI utilization across the system with an eye toward developing reports for evaluating usage on a broad basis. We will continue to update and develop established reports and dashboards as needed while providing targeted assistance via Slack.

Resource Management

Working Group

• With input from the NZ Management Group, the committee has decided to ask campuses to localize records that do not comply with the language of cataloging policy. Israel presented on how to identify problem NZ records, and how to run an unlinking job at the TS Open Forum on 9/12.

• There is a collection discovery issue in Primo for shared environments (i.e. consortiums). When a campus creates a collection (not to be confused with an electronic collection) in Alma, there is currently no way to localize discovery in Primo. Consequently, all campuses who have enabled collection discovery in Primo would see every Alma collection across all campuses. If there is more expressed interest among the CSU campuses in implementing Alma collections, we may seek to encourage Ex Libris to make this feature work for consortiums. Ex Libris documentation: Managing Collections.

• The committee reviewed the Council of University of Wisconsin Libraries (CUWL) technical report on their recent cooperative technical services pilot. While the CSU does not have a central tech services staff that would mirror the CUWL, the Resource Management Functional Committee members feel that we can still think of ways where we can benefit from centralized efforts in the area of resource management. The goal is to focus on collaboration.

Acquisitions & ERM

Chancellor’s Office

• Presented updating license terms of use with a script at the ULMS Summer meeting. Also presenting sharing NZ license terms with the IZ.

• Updating NZ procedures on the wiki. Moving outdated pages to Archive. Also set up links from current Acquisitions and ERM committee page to relevant wiki pages for NZ Procedures.

• Updating NZ licenses with July 2019 renewal information.

• Set up new Open Access e-collections in the NZ.

• Activated Alexander Street Press Academic Video Online U.S. e-collection in the NZ.

• Continue to send out ERM Weekly Updates on Fridays to keep ERM and Acquisitions users updated on the latest updates or changes to e-collections or licenses.

Working Group

• The Acquisitions Working Group held their first meeting as a separate group for the first time.

• Acquisitions Group: Continues to ask campuses to make changes/additions and improvements to the list of contacts on the Google doc.

• Acquisitions Group: Open Form scheduled in a November Tech Services Open Forum. Three campuses, San Marcos, Pomona, and San Jose, will demonstrate “Alma to PeopleSoft Financial Integration”

• Acquisitions Group: Investigate encumbrance issues at different campuses and discover possible solutions. Share findings with libraries.

• ERM Group: Jessica Hartwigsen & Kate Holvoet led two discussions at the ULMS Summer Meeting

• ERM Group: Completed review/updates of ERM Policy pages and ERM Contacts.

• ERM Group: Discussed various goals & objectives which can found here. Immediate projects include:

  • Conduct an inventory of all ERM info, consolidate the info, and create a maintenance schedule.

  • Investigate how we can address accessibility of databases as a consortia

  • Investigate issues between indexing levels and failed delivery

Resource Sharing

Chancellor’s Office

• Sandbox configuration: Continued monitoring cases and testing workflow with ExL support. Reached a point where requests can be created, sent, received and returned by one sandbox (UFR) with only one (important) piece of the configuration diverging from production. The other sandbox is stuck at a point so early in the process that borrowing requests can't be sent to the other partner at all. The issues between the sandboxes seem linked. Waiting for development to follow up.

• Courier service: Joe Adkins and Mallory met with Unity president/CEO to discuss issues with the transition from Triocr, service, communication and what can be done to address the problems our campuses are having. As a result of the meeting:

1. Pick up/Delivery schedule distributed to all campuses

2. Unity created new laminated flipcards with barcodes that are compatible with their tracking system and scanners and distributed them to campuses after a test period

3. All campuses set up in the Unity label printing system, removing the necessity to depend on defunct Tricor site.

4. Campuses now have access to Unity tracking site allowing campuses to track daily package pick up and delivery by bag ID or location.

5. Damage/Lost item claim procedure established, documented and disseminated

Joe has continued contact with Unity about any issues with the flip cards or tracking system throughout testing.

• Courier contract: Statement of work review and revisions complete. Included updates to delivery specs for all 32 delivery locations in the contract (23 campuses, Moss Landing, 3 satellite libraries and 5 UC libraries). Completed borrowing/lending volume analysis with UC campuses to ensure those included in the contract provide the most value (conducted by Natalya Magazino, San Marcos). Four out of five campuses will remain on the contract (Los Angeles, Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara and Riverside) while one will be replaced by Irvine (Davis).

• Talked with UC Shared Courier Service team about their experience with Unity and how they handle their contract in the wake of our contract update. Will continue to communicate with this team if other issues arise in the future.

• Investigating existing documentation of reciprocal resource sharing agreements between CSU and Ucs - there doesn't seem to be any documentation of recips between individual campuses and there is not any agreement for recips or discounted service between CSUs and UCs.

• Working with RSFC member Natalya Magazino, San Marcos to refine existing analytics reports to more accurately capture CSU+ data

• Managed onboarding the RS development partner campuses as the project officially began at the end of August.

Working Group

• At ULMS Summer Meeting the Resource Sharing Functional Committee presented on some of the things that they had been working on over the last year. Presenters included Isabel Mascorro (Northridge), Karla Salinas (Dominguez Hills), Natalya Magazino (San Marcos), Joe Adkins (San Francisco) and Chancellor’s Office Ex Officio Mallory DeBartolo. Some of the topics included Analytics Reports for Resource Sharing that had been developed over the last year and an item condition best practices and workflow aiming to add a quality control element to items lent through CSU+. The item condition thing was the result of a joint project between Fulfilment and Resource Sharing Functional Committees. At the ULMS Summer Meeting group discussion we discussed the idea of seeking improving the scheme for CSU+ loan periods, either making them longer or allowing for renewals. There was a lot of anecdotal evidence of patrons having to request the same book they had in hand over and over because they couldn’t renew. There was also anecdotal evidence of patrons keeping CSU+ items long after they were due because they couldn’t renew. One of the priorities and goals of the RSFC for the coming year is to try to uncover data through analytics to support the anecdotal evidence that the current CSU+ loan period scheme is suboptimal. An anticipated difficult area for this project is how to deal with media items.

• A second goal the RSFC has set and made progress toward is improving communication and engagement with the people in our functional area. RSFC had developed and implemented a CSU+ Tip email system that will periodically mass email a CSU+ workflow tip to our listservs. And there is also I-SPIE TV, which is a bit difficult to explain in a short paragraph, but we hope that it will improve communication and engagement with the people in our functional area. We also recently had a drive to improve campus spirit in CSU+ by adding campus logos to paging slips and stickers.

• Over the past year there has also been an ongoing process of improving communication and service from our courier.

Fulfillment

Chancellor’s Office

• Investigating unexpected behavior of "restore items" job on regular patron requests

• Investigating the feasibility of implementing the Booking function for course reserves and looking at config requirements in the sandbox

• Working with select Fulfillment committee members to research anonymization capabilities in Alma to lay the groundwork for system wide best practices

• Circling back with the fulfillment group and resource sharing group to close the loop on shared policy recommendations for walk in patrons

Working Group

• The Fulfillment Functional Committee will hold its next Open Forum on 10/17. Topics will include discussing Alma new release highlights, purging users and editing Letters.

• In the ULMS Summer Training general meeting last month, many ideas were discussed for future open forum demos as well as sharing of interesting/best practices. Cal Poly San Luis Obispo discussed their textbook give back program, CSULA shared how they incorporate surveys into their notices, and many CSU’s discussed budgets for their Course Reserves and identifying bottleneck courses. Committee member Jamie Lamberti from SFSU presented on Fulfillment Analytics, Kevin Phillips and Jeremy Vall from CSUF presented on 2 inventory models and Joanna Kimmitt from CSUDH presented on Student/Staff onboarding.

• Added Course Reserve Workflow to Fulfillment wiki.

• Currently interviewing all Course Reserves Coordinators to do an environmental scan of what practices are currently being employed throughout the system. We are attempting to find commonalities/differences between the campuses and also identify unique practices that could be employed at other campuses. This includes identifying bottleneck courses and working with the bookstore to fill these needs, how departments budget for textbook purchases, student textbook donation programs, etc. This also dovetails with a paper that was written in the committee last year regarding Student Success and the Library.

Discovery

Chancellor’s Office

• Focused on continuing development of the new UResolver interface, including testing on Sandbox over the summer. Testing in production in August revealed that divergent Alma configurations at various campuses created problems in the display. We are currently focused on a fresh batch of fixes to accommodate those differences.

Working Group

• The working group is considering several new goals for the year:

  • Developing a structure for supporting smaller campuses and those without developers with their technology needs

    • A list of experts and what they are experts in?

    • A structure for volunteering and contributing to coding/development work

    • What other training needs are there that the Discovery Working Group can fulfill?

  • Open Forums Structure:

    • Code Sharing - to share out the work that others are doing to improve their Primo interfaces

    • Drop in session for Q and A

  • Work with reference and instruction librarians on pain points around Primo

    • Revive Outreach and Instruction Task Force

• Things to watch out for the upcoming year

  • Migration to Central Discovery Index around February 2020

  • General release of the new UResolver