2024-08-27 All Chairs Meeting notes

Attendees

  • Sarah Lindsey, OT Chair

  • Tammy Guziejka, Acquisitions Operations Subteam chair

  • TJ Kao, Resource Management Operations Subteam chair

    • Catherine Busselen, RM vice-chair

  • Sandra Farfan-Gracia, Fulfillment Operations Subteam chair (ABSENT)

  • Jharina Pascual, E-Resources Operations Subteam chair

  • Jared Campbell, Discovery Operations Subteam chair (ABSENT)

    • Zoe Tucker, Discovery vice-chair! (ABSENT)

  • Caitlin Nelson, SILS Operations Center at CDL representative

  • Kristen Van Vliet – Resource Sharing Subteam Chair

    • Dawson Kelly, incoming RS vice chair!

Item

Desired Outcome

Time

Who

Notes

Decisions

Actions

Item

Desired Outcome

Time

Who

Notes

Decisions

Actions

1

(STANDING ITEM)

Subteam Roundup

Check-in on OSTs - capture any shared issues or cross-team task or anything you think we should know

5

Team

RM: still working with CDL on the specs of ProQuest MARC records for ETDs





2

Questions from Slack

FYI on anything quick that came up

5

Team

Not today

 

 

3

OT / LG updates

Inform on salient issues from OT and LG

5

Sarah

OT-related thing: OT has been tracking unsatisfying interactions with ExL support, and those examples were brought to the last support meeting. Some of those were answered / responded to, and some were taken as constructive criticism. e.g. A long-lingering ticket, where ExL asks “is this still a problem?” where they are asking us to get caught up when we think that’s their job. e.g. 2: When they can’t duplicate a problem, but we can. They think it might have to do with permissions on their end - so we are encouraging to do more to schedule a zoom or something so they can see the issue.

Reminder: NZ Access review stuff please

WIP explanation and update: it exists.

 

 

4

Workplan Review

Get an update on how each OST is handling workplan updates.

Questions to think about:

  • How often do you meet?

  • Where do your workplan items come from? (local issues, ExL tickets, aspirations, etc.)

  • How much bug fixing / maintenance / aspirational stuff do you get done?

  • How much does harmonization play into your work?

40

Caitlin / team

Round robin for who’s doing what with your workplan!

ACQ: We only meet monthly, and we are more of a discussion group at this point. I never had a chance to look at the workplan and maybe this is a good time to revisit what we want to do.

OT: (Meets every other week) Decided not to have a workplan - instead we’re more of a responsive group that takes things as they come in.

Discovery: (Meet every other week) We look at the quarterly feature release, that’s a regular part of our charter. We’re also going back through our list of things that’s been there since implementation - we got two done last year! We will add a line for the Next Discovery Experience, when that comes in. We are creating a short list of things to focus on this year. In addition to being on the systemwide group, we’re all on the local groups - so we see local tickets where there are pain points locally. We share what tickets we’re generating locally so other people know what’s going on - and we can consolidate with ExL. In the back of our minds, we have aspirations - but in reality we’re focusing on “keep the lights on stuff.” We’re kind of sysadmin heavy on our group - it would be nice to do more UX stuff. We do ask about harmonization, but haven’t been able to get there…

LG: (meet every other week, but cancel frequently). We reviewed our workplan in May, and most of these items are fairly new at this point. We also do a lot of spawning of project teams and oversight of those. Stuff tends to come from DOC, or from self-generated ideas.

eRes: We sometimes generate issues that pop up for escalation! Our licensing stuff is so multi-functional. We haven’t met yet this year - we meet every other week as a formal meeting, then the off week are optional troubleshooting sessions like office hours. Some of the asks we get require a level of harmonization that we haven’t been able to achieve yet, so there’s some frustration. We’re not doing any aspirational stuff so far. eRes is still kind of new in the world of library metadata - so something like print records housing electronic links is still a thing. So the world of library search is not in that world anymore, but locally workflows are old-fashioned.

Resource Sharing: Pre-SILS we still had weekly meetings from ILL people and broader monthly meetings as well. So our work impacts each other and always has - so our meeting frequency now is every week as RSOST and monthly as ILL-CKG. Workplan is sort of up-to-date, with projects we’ve completed but have reference, and in progress, and upcoming. A couple big projects are: Migrate to Tipasa and off VDX, and also issues with the AFN and trying to solve some analytics stuff. We’re also looking at going P2P for digital requests. We try to keep the workplan up to date, and projects take a super long time, so we don’t actually update it very often.

  • We do do bug fix discussions fairly often. These are often somewhat urgent in nature, or we need written info - so we tend to do these asynchronously.

  • We try to do aspirational stuff, but mostly our harmonization stuff is not in a vacuum and is more involved with many departments across multiple campuses, so it’s complex. Generally we do a pretty good job of IDing “This is something we NEED to harmonize” vs. “nice to have”.

  • P2P came from a deeper limitation of Alma that needs to be fixed; some of the other projects are in a similar vein - something is an issue, so let’s try to fix it or improve it.

    • Projects beget projects beget projects, so that does kind of add to that feeling of “being behind” or “pushing a rock up a hill”

  • It’s a new system and a new gov but ILL will always be collaborative.

Resource Management:

  • Meet every other week

  • Workplan: we have quite a few items (22) but about half of them are done already. It does seem like we’re using the workplan on an ongoing basis. The previous few chairs were very good at coming back to the workplan, and being founded there in our work: is this something we still want to work on? Is this still relevant? etc.

  • Alma keeps evolving in the RM area, so sometimes things get solved.

  • Bug fixing: we use Slack and emails a lot about any discoveries / workarounds.

  • Initially a lot of work came from migration.

  • Compared to some areas, the RM module is pretty decent - we can do what we need to do.

  • Harmonization: we did quite a bit at the beginning and much of that is tied to Alma functionality (i.e. normalization rules). We also get to a point where some campuses really care, and some don’t. So maybe this year our focus will slowly switch. Also 5 campuses were already on Alma standalone, so some established practices are being questioned if they apply to other campuses. Everyone is open to all kinds of ideas as we move forward.

  • At this point, we’re working very well and workplan drives our forward motion and record our history.

 

 

5

Wrap up

Review actions and decisions

5

Team

 

 

 

6

Parking Lot

Capture important topics for future discussion

5

 

 

 

 

7

 

Total

50 minutes

 

 

 

 

 

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