2019-11-08 Meeting Agenda & Notes

1:00-1:30

CSU+ Expansion

@brandon dudley (Unlicensed)

• A non-CSU institution has expressed interest in joining CSU+

  • Previously in Link+

  • Won’t be doing this after all

• Raises the question: How might we handle future requests like this?

  • Community Colleges coming on board with Alma in early 2020

  • UC’s finishing RFP for shared system as well

  • USC on Alma

  • Other large academics moving off of III to Ex Libris

• We could be a leader in California for resource sharing on Alma

• Possibilities with Orbis Cascade as well?

• We are development partners on Rapido, which could be useful here

• Preparatory steps

  • Take COLD’s temperature on expanding CSU+

  • Ask ExL & ourselves what it would take technically to do this:

    • with Rapido

    • without Rapido

• Feedback

  • Would we turn into net lenders with these other (particularly smaller) libraries?

    • perhaps not a bad thing as publicly-funded institutions

  • Do they have useful collections we would want to borrow?

    • Circuit has a policy for evaluating the distinctiveness of new members' collections

  • Need real data to answer the above questions

    • Likely need a preliminary philosophical discussion

    • Ground the conversation in reality / data after setting out a potential vision

  • Would this include any public libraries?

    • few public libraries on Alma

    • Rapido might change that equation

• Lots of opportunities to discuss this further

1:30-1:45

Confluence Strategy

@brandon dudley (Unlicensed)
@Mike DeMars (Unlicensed)
@Christina Mune (Unlicensed)

Christina, Mike and Brandon would like 10-15 mins to discuss upcoming Confluence changes at the next meeting. We want to focus on the standardization of the committee spaces and get feedback from the Chairs so we know what tweaks might be needed before moving ahead.

• In response to:

  • Complaints about finding content in Confluence via browsing and search

  • Lack of standardization in functional committee space

• Second time looking at report proposing new structure

  • New structure comes from card sorting exercises

  • Looking for feedback especially on page two of the report, which has space reorg

• Brandon will do the reorganization for the committees

• Feedback

  • What about joint task forces?

  • Likely just put them in the 'primary' functional committees

  • Training pages would fall outside of the functional committee

    • Some people want it all in one place

    • Others would like it with other material in the functional committee

  • What about pages that fall outside this structure?

    • Should maybe talk this over a bit before making major info architecture changes

    • Want to set firm patterns for where staff can find stuff

Open

1:45-2:00

Policy on Policies and Procedures

@brandon dudley (Unlicensed) @Joseph Adkins (Unlicensed) @Brian Moore (Unlicensed) @Dolly Lopez (Unlicensed)

• Draft Guidelines

  • Special thanks to Dolly for her work on this

  • Policies will go to COLD for approval

  • Best practice or procedure will be approved internally by functional committee

• There is potentially some fuziness between a policy and procedures

  • Is there an expectation that all campuses will implement a policy?

  • The recent ‘illegal aliens’ subject heading might be a useful example, as this requires a guiding philosophy (= policy) to use more inclusive language before working out procedure for how to implement that change.

  • Challenge enforcing any policies or procedures

    • Deans are the ultimate enforcers

  • Best practices, by comparison, are firmly grounded in the technology

• Next steps:

  • Everyone take some more time to review this

  • Send any suggestions by next Friday to this subcommittee

  • Document now open for comments

2:00-2:17

Ex Libris Contracts Survey

@brandon dudley (Unlicensed)

• Three different surveys runs over last few weeks

• Deans survey:

  • Questions

    • Satisfaction with Alma, Primo, support

    • Other products

  • 16 responses, rather short

    • Deans likely just focused on other projects

    • Any issues staff have are not bubbling up to deans

      • going up through ULMS governance

      • Up to John, David, Brandon to

  • Interested in Leganto

• Staff

  • Questions focused on issues or problems that are not coming up in ULMS governance

  • 129 responses

  • A lot of feedback that is challenging to synthesize in this short time

  • Scores were lower than previous surveys

    • Primo always scores lower than Alma

    • Honeymoon may be over

  • Preliminary analysis:

    • Not a ton of issues in common

      • Click-heaviness

      • Analytics challenges

      • Clunkiness of Alma and Primo

    • Spattering of disparaging comments about Alma, Primo

    • Some positive responses as well

    • Focusing on issues that are actionable for ExL to make improvements

    • Some expressed frustration at being in a shared system

      • may need to take into account dissenting views better?

    • Some responses might reflect a lack of awareness of some functionality

• Chairs

  • will summarize later

• Will be useful for purposes outside of contract negotiations

2:17-2:30

Importing Record sets to Network Zone

@brandon dudley (Unlicensed)

• We have a request to add a set of data set records (ICPSR - Social Sci related) to Primo.

  • This would happen via OAI-PMH and pipe

  • Not a traditional resource, as it’s datasets instead of articles

  • Is this of broad interest to other campuses?

• Since this is the first request to add a set of records to Primo that isn’t available through “normal” means (record import or knowledge base), it would be good to take the group’s temperature on what needs to be examined or discussed prior.

• Who needs to be involved in vetting such requests (EAR? ERM? Discovery?)

  • May first be a question about collections

  • EAR is undergoing a major reorg this year

  • Reference and instruction librarians may have differing perspective

• Pipe will need to be managed and maintained

• Will need to figure out some next steps here.

COLD Prep

@John Wenzler (Unlicensed)

How should I use my time at COLD to get the best guidance for the ULMS Steering Committee? I am thinking about asking for time in December to talk about CSU+ Expansion and then asking for time in a Spring meeting for a broader strategic discussion.

Time Permitting

Updates

All

Analytics & Assessment

• SUSHI usage survey closed Friday. Proceeding to analyze results.

• ULMS Survey for Analytics & Assessment submitted. Issues noted were:

  • Scalability - particularly in NZ

  • Data availability - Not all data is exposed through ETL. Tighter integration between the way data is organized and presented in Alma and reported on in Analytics is desired.
    
    

  • Primo Analytics - An underdeveloped product (Google Analytics is the standard). There is doubt about the reliability of current reports.
    
    

  • Course reserves - Available reports are unsatisfactory.
    
    

• Completing initial review of the centrally shared vendors’ COUNTER 5 compliance/transition date documentation. This draft will help reference important information once ALMA can handle COUNTER 5.

• Mapping workflows for staff and ERM/Systems Librarians that want to implement SUSHI at this time.

Fulfillment

· We will be having our Open Forum this Thursday discussing Letters/Notices, Purging Users and new release highlights. We had an open forum last week with Fulfillment folks to discuss our general feelings about Alma/Primo and Ex Libris support. The discussion points were used to fill out the Chair Survey that was sent in on Friday, 11/1.

· Course Reserves interviews are coming close to an end, with a few coordinators left to speak with. The resulting notes will be shared with the Fulfillment group and our findings will be shared out in the Spring.

· Fulfillment and Resource Sharing committees got together to discuss possibly extending the CSU+ loan periods. A lively discussion was had and a task force was formed which will include 1 member of the Fulfillment committee.

Acquisitions

· We have our TS Open Forum this week. “Alma to PeopleSoft Financial Integration”

· Continuing – reviewing the “Getting Started Doc” (on going)

· We are reviewing/updating Acquisition Policies to be completed by the end of the year.

Resource Management

• LCSH Illegal aliens update- Waiting for COLD approval before proceeding with the proposed approach for addressing this problematic LCSH term.

• NZ Management Group update- In the October cleanup of bibs without inventory, 85,394 e-resources records were deleted and 35,241 physical resources records were deleted. The NZ Management Group will meet soon to discuss whether we should perform the e-resources records cleanup more frequently. We’ll also explore other potential NZ management projects.

• ULMS Survey for Resource Management submitted. Among the general issues facing Resource Management:

  • Collection discovery is not localized in our consortium environment

  • Deduping vector in Primo could be refined for better and more precise deduping.

  • Alma terminology could be more clear, e.g. “copy to catalog” can mean either “copy to IZ” or “unlink from NZ”, depending on the context.

  • More precise conditions for advanced searching desired (for all indexes), e.g. does not contain, not equal to, etc

• Upcoming BIBFRAME session- Jodi Williamschen from the Library of Congress will present an introduction and overview to BIBFRAME on Thursday, 11/14/19, 11-12pm via Zoom. More details at this Thursday’s TS Open Forum. Many thanks to Luiz Mendes for coordinating this.

Resource Sharing

· One of our RSFC members (Isabel Mascorro) left the employment of the CSU. A replacement member (Darnesa Morris) was called up from the minor leagues in short order. Thanks Brandon!

· Held a joint meeting with the Fulfilment Functional Committee in regard to CSU+ loan periods (extention or renewals). We solicited ideas and concerns and received some good feedback to use as a starting point for what data we need to collect. For example, fear of loss appeared to be one of the main concerns so we know one area to investigate is CSU+ book lost book rates, etc. Christine Evans from the FFC has agreed to join us in our quest.

· Started a discussion on revamping RSFC’s Confluence space. Confluence reorg was something looked into by the last steering committee. And I know at the top space things were reorganized. Brandon recently sent out an email about that which kicked off a discussion about if our space needs so jazzing up. We decided that it does and also discovered that there were some common Alma procedures our people need to know about that weren’t covered yet on Confluence, even though we all thought they had been. Next steps are to actually get to the editing and improvement of our Confluence space.

· Many RSFC members + our CO Ex Officio Mallory DeBartolo went to Minneapolis for the Next Gen Resource Sharing (Rapido) Partnership Kickoff Meeting.

· Started investigating some interesting things in Alma’s new release. Notification Email Delay is of interest because this has been a problem with CSU+ from day 1. The Hold Shelf notification email is sent at the beginning of the CSU+ receiving workflow. Books don’t actually get on the hold shelf until a not insignificant time later. For example, if you receive 60 books and each book takes 1 minute to fully process with hold shelf flag or wrapper, etc. and then placed on hold shelf, books may arrive on the hold shelf up to an hour after an email was sent telling patron that the book was on the hold shelf. But this setting might not be good for people with ASRS because it appears the delay is for all hold shelf notices. We will investigate and test. Another new update is that Alma can now talk to ILLiad through API. This is useful for ILLiad as lender of last resort if CSU+ cannot fill. The old setup involved Alma sending an email somewhere and then ILLiad would read the email. API should be simpler to setup and in theory more secure. We will be testing to see if this really works as advertised as well.

· Replaced UC Davis with UC Irvine as a courier delivery stop. Earlier this year we did a study across the CSUs to see how were our most common UC ILL partners. UC Davis was at the bottom of the list and UC Irvine was highest of those not already on the courier delivery schedule. A new contract with Unity was recently signed and switching these two UCs was asked for. But sending to UC Irvine via Unity is not live yet as we are still working with UC Irvine on logistics.

· Did another I-SPIE TV.

Discovery

1. Ran our first Discovery Open Forum for the year. David Walker presented on Git, GitHub, and sharing ways that folks can share their expertise in terms of development

2. The Discovery Steering Committee met to discuss our priorities and projects for the year. We are identifying the status of our current projects, as well as looking for additional features to possibly develop this upcoming year.

3. We are also planning to host another Open Forum this month, possibly around the new GetIt Implementation that the committee has been working on.

ERM

• Discussed the change from PCI to CDI. The ERM committee recommends that we leave CDI activation to each institution.

• Almost finished taking inventory. Working on updating several ERM pages within the ULMS wiki.

• Working on a possible Open Forum session on ERM workflows.