Access 2016

We exist as a very small Library Systems team at the University of New Brunswick Libraries, tasked with maintaining dozens of custom applications, Drupal instances, as well as required to meet a demand for constant new development.
Several years ago we faced the reality of an un-repayable level of technical debt. The burden from historic organically developed projects, a lack of responsible technical policy and our failure to adopt a standardized architecture had left our team unable to provide an acceptable level of service without a drastic change in how we worked, the tools we worked with, and the projects we developed. We wanted to solve this.
This session will present our evolution from the architecture and workflow of yesteryear towards a version controlled, CI centered workflow that creates, updates and tests our web assets as we work.
Presentation Overview:

• Our transition from a server-centered thought process towards treating web instances as 'applications'.
• The determination and implementation of a common server OS across Development/Staging/Live platforms.
• Provisioning of hardware from bare-metal with razor-server.
• Server level configuration management in Git and deploying to instances via bare repos.
• Our Thoughts in Choosing Drupal as a core architecture.
• 'One Button' Drupal project and core update deployments via GitHub and Jenkins.
• Post-deployment testing with CucumberJS.
• Local development spin-up with docker, Vagrant, Chef.
• Audit of changes and team notifications through Amazon AWS Tools.
• Adoption of Slack as a core communication tool. 

List of Resources Mentioned in Presentation: https://goo.gl/AkLI65

What does your library need from a tutorials platform? For several years, the University of Vermont has flipped library instruction with tutorials created in Guide on the Side. This open-source program, provided by the University of Arizona, is a simple tool for producing frame-based tutorials centered on the learner’s interaction with web content. UVM adopted it principally because of its suitability to formative learning. But in 2016 Springshare launched LibWizard, an alternative platform for frame-based tutorials. It offered important functionalities that were not available in Guide on the Side, while lacking others that were integral features of our existing tutorials. Come to this session to hear how the availability of similar, yet distinct, products helped us to rethink our current and future tutorial needs. This presentation will explain how we developed and applied an evaluation rubric that could be applied to any platform of this kind. It will also highlight other aspects of our decision-making process, including questions about migrating existing tutorials, about rewiring our approach to creating tutorial objects, and about advocating for product development.

Arca is a Canadian consortial digital repository based on an Islandora multisite, coordinated by the BC ElectronicLibrary Network, hosted and supported by discoverygarden. It is currently home to 11 BC post-secondary institutions’ repositories and growing, giving them an affordable way to provide access to faculty and student research output across multiple post-secondary institutions, and to support the management of institutional digital assets. This session describes how Arca came to be, including how government funding was obtained, the decision to go open source, the challenges of wrangling the needs of a very diverse group of institutions on a shared code base, and the particular challenges of doing it in Canada. And how we’re doing it on a shoestring budget (for a given value of “shoestring”), with minimal in-house technical expertise and a lot of learning on the fly.
Possible takeaways: Get some details on how a consortial repository model might work for you; start a conversation about best practices for consortial repositories; consider the benefits and pitfalls of a collaborative repository vs. doing it yourself. 

It’s been over a year since Ryerson University’s newest addition to campus, the Library of the 21st century - the Student Learning Centre (SLC) was opened. This fascinating new building offers students an unprecedented learning space beyond its contemporary looking glass walls and automatic solar blinds. In this presentation, the speakers will discuss how Ryerson’s Student Learning Centre has changed some of the traditional roles of academic libraries, while presenting new opportunities and challenges. The speakers will use the Library’s Digital Media Experience Lab (DME) located in the Student Learning Centre as a case study to frame this discussion.
Over the past academic year Ryerson Library has offered access to interesting and emerging technologies such as Arduino microcontrollers, LittleBits, Oculus Rifts, Pico projectors as well as access to innovative workshops such as DIY DroneBuilding and 3D printed wearable technology. As part of the implementation of these programs Ryerson Library has also widely employed the use of Slack as a communication tool, replacing the traditional Walkie-Talkies.

Subject Guides at the Carleton University Library were built in 2011 on a home-grown Drupal template, mirroring the tabbed design of LibGuides. By 2015, the number of tabs in use was making the guides unwieldy in mobile and even on larger screens. The Library’s Web Committee wanted to design a guide that would be user-friendly for students, while also meeting the needs of another significant user group: library staff. Through user research with both groups and user testing with students, we came up with a design to meet the needs of both students and library staff. This presentation will give a quick tour of our new design, emphasizing how user research drove our design decisions and helped with staff buy-in.

The repository services space has had mixed success, and the experience at Carleton University has been no different. While theses and dissertations are well covered, our faculty publications content remained limited both in scope and growth. We needed a new platform and a new approach, and the MacOdrum Library found an exciting solution by going Dutch.

The Artudis repository platform is being actively developed at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, and in early 2016 we embarked on a beta program partnership to be the first North American implementation of this new open source platform. This presentation will focus on the rapid deployment model supported by Artudis, the standard as well as new exciting content types we can now manage, reporting and visualizations using Google’s BigQuery, plus a tour of key user and system administration features.

Discussion will also include the key underpinnings to our decision, with a focus on metadata, identifiers, linked data, and the central role that publisher APIs can play, permitting us to grow our faculty publications 30 fold in less than six months.

 Finally, we’ll demonstrate how we can improve the value and interest in our open access repository by making a major shift to integrate selected non-open access content.

 

In library school we're taught the parts, process and importance of a reference interview.  The reference interview, if done well can save one from unnecessary embarrassment and also ensure you're answering the question being asked with the answer that is needed. As a systems librarian, troubleshooting is my middle name. I may not be helping someone do research or find that particular book but I am helping someone understand a system they are using, sometimes that someone is me. I've realized that the reference interview is not only completely applicable to my work but also vitally important to successful troubleshooting in IT. The catch? Often the reference interview is unknown or not applied in library IT or IT in general. This talk will outline, reiterate and relate the parts of the traditional reference interview on books/databases/life and how to apply them in troubleshooting and supporting library systems and their users, and help users ask the better question by having the right information.

The number of 3D models available to both students and teachers online is rapidly expanding. Not only are the 3D model collections of popular websites like Thingiverse.com growing, but organizations such as the Smithsonian Institute and NASA have also recently begun building collections of 3D models and making these openly accessible online. Yet, even with the increased interest in 3D printing, 3D scanning, and virtual reality technologies, there is still little known about the overall structure of the 3D model content available on the internet. How many 3D models are actually available? Who is responsible for producing these models? How fast is this content growing? How many of these 3D models are suitable for educational purposes in general? Based on in-depth research into the collections of more than one hundred 3D model repositories, this presentation seeks to answer these questions and more, providing a detailed picture of how 3D models exist across a multitude of websites and online repositories, and attempting to determine how much of this content is suitable for the purposes of education.

McMaster University's William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections recently implemented a customised instance of Access to Memory (AtoM), a FLOSS archival description platform. In this session, three members of the project team will explore the complexities of implementing a major migration project involving highly unruly data, including:
AtoM is based on formal standards of archival description which often correspond inelegantly to the realities of how materials accumulate in archives—what is a "fonds" vs. a "collection" in real terms? How can you describe a manuscript within an archival standard? What do you do when an item has no attendant authority record? How do you address the inconsistencies in descriptive practise that all institutions experience over time, as staff and standards change? From a technical perspective, we had the challenge of migrating over 890 descriptive records from totally unstructured static HTML pages to the MySQL database which underlies AtoM. This undertaking, and the major design changes we needed to make to customise AtoM to our institution and users, presented some real logistical questions—especially given that each member of the project team reports to a different supervisor.
And what would any IT project be without a few bugs which take you completely by surprise when it's too late to back out? Making the framework of the standard—and thus the software—fit the idiosyncracies of descriptive practise and our institutional context required some real creativity. We will share our approach. Which worked. More or less.

Problems associated with noise in academic libraries are an ongoing concern for patrons and library administration. Loudness is subjective, so what may be noisy to one person is acceptable to another. In our pilot project, we used sensors to measure decibel levels in order to quantify what is “silent” versus what is “quiet”. Decibel measurement data were visualized on screens, allowing visitors to see the noise levels in their area or in other areas of the library. This display allowed visitors to choose the area with the right amount of noise for their purposes (e.g., 2 students working quietly together would go to a semi-silent area; whereas 1 student going to read a book would want to pick the quietest area in the library). In addition, decibel levels taken at regular intervals were sent to a database which could be queried in order to make informed and targeted interventions.
We used an Arduino microcontroller with a decibel measurement sensor which continually measured the decibel levels in an area. A Raspberry Pi computer collected this data from the connected Arduino and the Python programming language was used to format this data to display on multiple screens with HTML5, jQuery and Google Charts.
This prototype project is ongoing and presenters will provide a demonstration of how the Arduino and Raspberry Pi work together to display the noise levels. Results and conclusions drawn from the pilot project will help inform library policies on space planning, library services, and enhancing the user experience.

In this session, we’ll look at how inferred and contextual aspects of a search query can offer new ways of thinking about the “10 blue links” of a search result page. We present one possibility for evolving library search by introducing the ideas and processes behind enhancements that apply time, space, and query analysis data within our search interfaces. In our search prototype, we demonstrate how anticipatory design models and “intention [data] mining” of search queries create a new kind of search experience: a search that anticipates your questions. We consider the benefits and pitfalls of anticipatory design models as we look to understand the intentions of search queries and the physical/network locations of our users. In redesigning “search as a conversation”, we’ll consider how the anticipatory design model raises questions about privacy and we’ll present preliminary usability findings that look to understand where the line between adding value to a system ends and feelings of surveillance arise.

Academic libraries often struggle to find language and web architectures to reflect the services we provide and the work that we do. This results in a discrepancy between the reality of library space and service and the way in which they are presented on the open web. Often the core of what the library provides its users is articulated in expansive, catch-all “Services” menus.
The Web Team at the NCSU Libraries developed a structured content model and “user activities taxonomy” that allows us to dynamically align and present service elements around user goals rather than our organizational structures. Building off the success of this approach, we are developing additional taxonomies, driven by a user-centered ontology, to modularize more of our content in meaningful ways. An example of this is the “projects taxonomy” which allows us to better reflect work done by the libraries to external stakeholders, complementing the “user activities taxonomy” by expanding the types of content touched by taxonomic structures.
This talk will be on the process of establishing user-focused information architectures (IAs) through the principles of narrative taxonomy and will cover our application of user-focused IAs through the use of Drupal taxonomies. We will also address what this approach has meant for information presentation on the NCSU Libraries website, touch on the strategies used to garner stakeholder buy-in, and discuss the practicalities of how ontologies drive structural decision making.

Maybe it goes without saying, but building an institutional repository from scratch requires a tremendous amount of effort. There's upper-level project management, institution-wide organizational concerns, extensive content recruitment, back-end technical requirements, workflow creation, quality assurance challenges, astounding potential for custom development, political struggles, copyright hurdles, policy creation, bug squashing, records management and digital preservation concerns... and these concerns likely barely scratch the surface of day-to-day operations. While institutional repository software is developed for the general needs of institutions, institutions themselves are incredibly specific; each school, library, college, university a snowflake in its own right with unique organizational structures, hierarchies, and needs.
Often – out of necessity – it is the job of too few to accommodate these needs. Questions may be answered hastily in the interest of progress. There are faculty and colleagues to account for. Time is short. Expectations are high.
Over two years of development of a new institutional repository at the University of New Brunswick, the myriad challenges of building an institutional repository have become abundantly and repeatedly clear. Unless you've already built a repository at your institution with identical software, you will be embarking on a learning process.
This talk is intended to walk through the challenges and victories over approximately 2 years of extended development and implementation of the UNB Scholar institutional repository at the University of New Brunswick told by the two folks whose hands are the dirtiest, spanning metadata, project-level management, politics, managing expectations, and continued development.