2022-06-01 Meeting notes

The meeting recording is available for download in the OT Shared Google Folder, which you can access using this link: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1S2RffOW7nlLI9IinLmJAiMz-aGqy4BVq?usp=sharing

Updates - from All-Chairs, Leadership Group, etc.

Provide updates from other SILS meetings

12 mins

Tom

• OT Update: We put together a Google Doc where folks can post their planned time away

  • Please add the upcoming dates you’re expecting to be out of office to this document

    • This will help with meeting attendance, planning, etc.

  • Tom will be out next week, so he won’t be at the OT-SC meeting; Jackie will lead that meeting

• Update from Leadership Group:

  • LG finished going through the updated work plan, and there is an item from the work plan that will come back to OT - ExL Support Response Time

    • How many of the tickets that we have open are we resolving on our own without ExL help, or before ExL comes back to us to resolve it?

      • Want to get a good idea of how much of our time is spent resolving problems that could be, and probably should be resolved by ExL for us when we open the ticket

    • If folks have this information, or have a way of finding it, please gather that information and maybe we can get back together and put together a spreadsheet of how many we have

      • Include how long it took to resolve the problem

    • Is this regarding each campus handling the tickets? Or NZ tickets?

      • Any support requests that campuses put into ExL, and end up closing and resolving themselves

    • Some instances may not be a negative to ExL

      • It could be that the campus has opened the ticket prematurely and hadn’t stumbled upon the solution yet, but then did and closed the ticket

    • There are also some instances where the response ExL provided wasn’t helpful, but the ticket was closed anyway; should those be included?

      • It would be helpful to include these along with a note explaining that the response ExL provided wasn’t helpful

  • LG also discussed the townhall, which will be on June 23 at 11am

    • A message should have gone out with a save the date, and LG is still putting things together for the townhall

  • There was a joint council ULs and DOC Steering Committee that met on May 23rd

    • The idea was presented, which will be shared at the Town Hall as well, asking for the Libraries' Leadership to be more clear about the SILS workload and reasonable work expectations

      • Trying to get the understanding that we are not on the implementation time schedule that we were before

      • Hoping that relieves at least a little bit of the pressure to try to get things done in a hurry vs. getting things done well and figuring out solutions

  • Tom also gave an update to LG regarding our discussion with Danielle

    • LG gets where we are coming from, and we still need to finish updating our document, to make it more official

• Update from All-Chairs

  • Tom shared with them an update on analytics

  • Meeting was mostly a round-up of what everyone was doing; mostly an FYI session

  • Discussed getting a list of campus contacts from Danielle

    • This list was provided in the email that Danielle sent out this morning with subject line: Upcoming call for UCOP statistics + June 02 Workshop on gathering OP statistics through Alma Analytics (IZ)

Q & A Session - Including Questions on Slack since last meeting

Any questions from the team?

Questions from Slack?

4 mins

Team

• Questions from Slack:

  • Slowness on the listserv for Asia Pacific, and now Europe is chiming in

    • Greg received feedback from his local coordinators group, particularly Metadata, that they started seeing extreme slowness reported last week but didn’t share this with Greg

    • UCSD Metadata Coordinator said that her perception is that things are taking 2-3x as long to finish

      • Greg’s Sys Load yesterday took 2-hours when it normally takes 20 minutes

    • Nobody else on the North American listserv is chiming in

    • Curious if anyone else is noticing anything?

      • Tom asked his group, but hasn’t received a response

    • Greg plans to open a ticket for UCSD about this soon, probably today

    • From Greg: We are the second library, and the largest library, to use the new Alma API for InReach which is the local consortial borrowing program that Innovative has

      • Working with Innovative and ExL right now to get that up and running; soft launched last week

        • UCSD’s version of Link+

      • Greg messaged the contact in Israel on the project, because they’re getting a bunch of aborted publishing jobs for items and bibs

        • They’re not consistent, but Greg is curious if the general job slowness is affecting this as well

        • They haven’t responded yet, so not sure

          • They have a small window when they can interact with them

        • Overall, UCSD is seeing something

    • Is anyone else experiencing this slowness?

      • UCI isn’t experiencing any issues

      • Tom’s guess is that the volume isn’t the same for UCM as it is for UCSD, and that’s why they haven’t noticed anything

Topics or questions for the Ex Libris Support Meeting

Any topics or questions that should be addressed at the next monthly Ex Libris Support Meeting?

2 mins

Team

• Any topics or questions that should be addressed at the next monthly Ex Libris Support Meeting?

  • Meeting was pushed by a week due to the holiday; next meeting is June 27 so we have some time to accrue topics

  • If anyone has any topics, please send them to Tom/Caitlin

  • Also, if you have any tickets that aren’t being responded to, and that you’ve escalated and still haven’t received any responses, include those tickets as well so Tom/Jackie/Caitlin can address them

• Topics so far:

  • The lack of meaningful information in Ex Libris' emails or status updates when there is a service disruption

    • Saying they acknowledge that something went down and that they got the service working again isn’t enough

    • They need to provide more information

      • It would be good feedback for them that they should include in their email that a root cause analysis will be released later, instead of only mentioning this in the details

ALMA Publishing Profile Registration - UCSF

Determine next steps in identifying if a campus specific problem or if it is affecting other campuses as well.

4 mins

Tom / Team

• Zach reported that Third Iron recognized a significant loss of record numbers in their data

  • However, there were not identifiable changes in Alma that should have precipitated that loss

  • ExL troubleshooting and workarounds are not reasonable and the issue needs escalation

    • Possibly documentation demonstrating identification as either local or systemwide affect

• Update from Zach:

  • Third Iron reported a significant drop in the number of records they were getting from UCSF's browsing publishing profile

    • So there was a lot of remedial back and forth with ExL, like is the job set-up correctly, is the set pulling all of the titles, and all that is checking out

  • Over the last few of days it’s becoming pretty apparent that the problem is on Third Iron’s side, or at least the problem is getting the records out of the OAI repository

    • The publishing job is working and the records are in there; Zach can query them individually and they show up as being in the set that they’re supposed to be in

  • Third Iron is saying that they’ll have their technicians look into this

    • It is still very strange that it’s only happening in UCSF’s instance; still possible there is something misconfigured in UCSF’s OAI environment on ExL’s side that is causing a time-out or something like that when Third Iron runs their job

  • Zach thinks they’ve narrowed down the problem being Third Iron’s harvesting of records from UCSF’s OAI repository, because the records are in there

    • Still very much a mystery, and still very much something in progress

  • Nobody else is reporting this problem and Third Iron is saying it’s not happening in anyone else’s instance

    • Compared UCB’s information to UCSF’s information in terms of the configuration and it looked identical, so there’s definitely nothing there that should be causing it because UCB is not experiencing this issue

    • Zach was able to find a way to see the data that’s coming out, and it really is all there, so we’re not sure why it isn’t getting through to Third Iron properly

      • Went from thinking it was a problem on the Alma publishing side, and now it’s pretty clear it’s a problem on the Third Iron harvesting side, but we still don’t know exactly what it is

  • Good news is that unless we experience another issue like this at another campus, it seems like this is a localized issue

    • Hopefully it will get resolved soon

Training/webinar on how to get some of the UCOP statistics pulled from Alma

Update from Working Group re: training/webinar on how to get some of the UCOP statistics pulled from Alma

11 mins

Sarah

• Danielle sent out her email this morning saying the timeline was going to be the same, and promoted the workshop in that email

• Danielle is still not sure if we might get a reprieve from Schedule C which is the ILL Statistics

  • There is a Subteam from Resource Sharing who is trying to investigate pulling AFN stats out of Alma

    • This is one of those expectation setting things; if they can’t figure out how to do that then ILLs could still report VDX statistics, but nothing else

• Also Schedule B which is usually prepared by the RLFs

  • Sarah encouraged Danielle to skip this one for this year; everything overlaps but this one isn’t as connected

  • Danielle couldn’t give answers yet on this one; so we’re still waiting on when the request comes out and when they publish the spreadsheet template for this year

• Request/Ask will come out in July and the statistics will be due in Sept/Oct

  • Wanted to have the workshop now because it’s easiest to pull statistics in July, when you’re closest to the beginning of the FY

• Otherwise, pretty much every other aspect of the statistics should be covered

  • Don’t think they’ll get too far into the circulation stat report

  • New campuses probably have more confidence in analytics when it comes to Circ stats; was a smaller hill to climb for the already-alma campuses than collection count type of stats

• The training will happen tomorrow afternoon

  • Training will be recorded; Sarah will put the link to the recording in the SILS Cohort Google Drive, in the Public Materials Shared Folder

    • We will also share out the link to the recording on Slack and in a cohort email

• UCI, UCR, and UCSC are all going to be showing, especially with Schedule D, which is where we count number of physical items, the different ways each campus gathers this info - UCI does it differently than UCSC

  • Hoping there will be many examples on how to do Schedule D, and campuses can choose which method will work best for them based on their data

    • And also, everybody who is presenting can answer any specific questions that come up later or after the presentation

  • Curious if you were to apply another campus' methodology for counting number of physical items to your own campus, would you get the same answer or would it come out different?

    • Right - so the difference between UCI and UCSC:

      • To do their physical item counts by material type: UCI is using their item policy field from their item records because their item policies matched with their material types in their old system, and UCSC is using the material type from the item record, because they’ve done a lot of clean up and remediation in that field

        • If UCSC ran UCI’s report, the data would look different

        • Some of it is data dependent, how your data came from your old system and how it migrated

      • UCSC used to use advanced search for UCOP counts, but this isn’t very reproduceable and is unpredictable/unreliable, but analytics is more reproduceable, even though you know they may not be perfect

        • If we accept that the information is not perfect but we are always doing some kind of clean-up and remediation on our ILS data, and that our numbers will get better, and that these are our numbers

• Campuses have done a ton of work trying to pull these UCOP stats together in ways that are not reasonable

  • Have to move on from that and say the number that comes out is the number, and it’s going to be a better number next year

    • We’ll make our data better, and so our numbers will get better

      • This will be important to say again and again

  • ROI is confusing - we don’t have the accuracy and it’s unclear what the consequences are of good numbers and bad numbers

    • For example some campuses report their Gov Docs and some campuses just include their Gov Docs into their books and serials count, and report 0 Gov Docs, and there are no consequences to that

• UCM - there’s been some curiosity about what will be shared in terms of ILS statistics

  • It’s kind of interesting because everyone has reports, and we can put the reports in the shared folders or the dashboards; but if a campus has different data than the data that the report was built on, then the dashboard report will look different

  • Hoping to at least demonstrate from local experience, and how it works on UCSC’s data

    • That’s the only thing that’s weird about the shared analytics reports

      • Can’t see it on the data that it was designed for, because it’s not your data

• A lot of UCOP and CDL people will be attending the session tomorrow - Gem, Alison, Danielle, and 1-2 more

  • Someone at UCSC has figured out how to do e-record counts for the NZ

    • Sarah talked to Alison, Danielle, and Gem about this and they were fine with UCSC showing this during the session; not that it will necessarily be the campus’s responsibility, but just so that people have that ability to pull those numbers themselves

  • But also have a wish list of what they would love someone who has NZ analytics access, to pull

    • There is hope for the future in that regard as an ask for UCOP

      • Gem is the analytics point person, Alison is the Chair of the Resource Sharing group so she has some interest in Schedule C and she previously did SFX

      • Gem is the point person and is doing her best to try to make it work with the NZ analytics; if she has the requirements list from campuses, she can see if she can make it work, barring any technical issues

UCOP Statistics and Analytics

Discuss updates from group working on converting “ask” document into a declaration document to set expectations

2 mins

Tom / Team

• The group hasn’t worked on this yet

  • Have been focused on getting the workshop up and running

• Caitlin will run point on getting the UCOP Statistics and Analytics “ask” document out to the group who is planning to work on converting this document to an explanation setting document, and will work on getting the group started on this effort

Discuss System/Component Down Communication Path

Discuss feedback on the updated version of the System/Component Down Communication Path?

11 mins

Team

• Any feedback on the updated version of the System/Component Down Communication Path?

• Caitlin walks the group through the current iteration of the document

  • Lots of different paradigms in this communication, would love input on these because Jackie and Caitlin weren’t sure what would work best for everyone, to make it clear

    • Guide for tiered technical communications, checklist, sample timeline, chart, etc.

  • Chart at the end is trying to explain “when do I do what, and to whom I communicate”; trying to explain when to broaden communication to stakeholders outside your campus

    • Expectations for communication under what circumstances, and closing the loop

  • Point of this document is trying to help local campuses know who to contact and when

    • Ideally this document will be published on Confluence as a recommended best practice, in the Doc Hub

• At this point, it’s not a super high priority thing; but proposed steps forward:

  • OT looks at it and gives feedback

    • Signs-off on it being good enough, or noting what parts should maybe be removed/edited

  • After which, OT gives the stamp of approval and we move forward with publishing this on Confluence

  • Not sure how quickly this needs to happen, but these are the ideal next steps

• What is the status of the questions in the document?

  • These are still open questions

  • Should the document be super precise, or more open for people depending on the situation?

    • Another question that Caitlin/Jackie are looking for advice on from OT

• Questions:

  • Who would be sending the communication?

    • This is one of the open questions noted in the document

      • The default would probably be the OT rep, but if there is someone on campus who is willing to do it; we probably don’t want to be so prescriptive

        • By default should be the OT rep, but if there is another campus communications person to delegate this to, that is also fine

        • Caitlin added this to the document

• Next Steps:

  • OT will have until June 9th to make comments on the documents

    • Jackie and Caitlin will make updates to the document per the OT commentary after June 9th

  • OT will vote on the document at the next meeting, on June 15th

Executive Session

Private discussion as needed

Parking Lot

Capture important topics for future discussion

• Taking the Temperature Survey

  • Discuss Responses from Survey, particularly the What worries you? and What are you most excited about? sections

• Communication with Subteams, Cohort, and Campuses

• Need to create a page for System Down Reporting

46 mins