Emily singleysystemspresentation
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This document discusses the future of library systems and technology at Boston College. It outlines that library systems are moving from traditional roles of maintaining systems to becoming more interoperable, accessible, and personalized. This will be achieved through tools like cloud technologies, collaborative spaces, and ubiquitous assessment. It will also require staff who are user-centered, collaborative, and have a culture of openness. Libraries must support innovation by allowing staff to learn, create, play, and take risks in order to develop the dynamic systems of the future.
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Emily singleysystemspresentation
- 1. Creating the Future of Scholarship a vision for library systems and technology at Boston College Emily Singley | July 9, 2015 @emilysingley emilysingley.net
- 2. Where are we now? traditional roles for library systems Where are we going? emerging roles for library systems How do we get there? technologies, staffing, and support for innovation
- 3. where are we now?
- 4. maintain traditional library systems
- 6. where are we going?
- 8. interoperability “annoying to have to go back and forth” - quote from student
- 9. integrate with digital scholarship http://id.lib.harvard.edu/via/olvwork185688/catalog
- 10. integrate with online learning https://developers.exlibrisgroup.com/blog/Primo_BlackboardAdaptor
- 11. access for everyone, from everywhere accessibility
- 12. fast, streamlined, trouble-free access to resources linked correctly access problem
- 13. personalization Read by QxMD app
- 14. “Similar articles/books/research suggestions would be really helpful!” - quote from student
- 15. how do we get there?
- 16. tools and technologies staffing for the future support for innovation
- 17. what tools and technologies do we need?
- 18. dynamic, agile infrastructures Cloud Virtual SaaS Image by Kurdistann (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
- 20. collaborative spaces Basecamp Confluence Footprints Jira Git and GitHub Google Drive Slack
- 22. who do we need to be? staffing for the future
- 25. Cross-institution event on Primo learn from each other
- 26. culture of openness Systems Ask a ^Librarian
- 27. support for innovation learn, create, play, risk
- 28. learn
- 30. play
Editor's Notes
- Thank you very much for this opportunity to speak with you. In the next few minutes, I’m going to share my vision for how library systems and technologies at BC can advance the future of research, teaching, and learning over the next 3-5 years.
- Break talk into three broad areas.
- Traditional library services – whether it be public facing discovery services, or access services, or staff facing functionality for inventory control, cataloging, e-resource management – will continue to be relevant and important.
- I believe we should be maintaining these systems over the next few years. I like how you have done this on your library site keeping journal and database discovery prominent, even while rolling out a new discovery layer. upgrading infrastructure, modernizing Unis, making them more user-friendly
- Maintaining these systems also means upgrading them. Moving them, when appropriate, to more modern infrastructures – for example, we recently migrated Aleph (remember Aleph?) to a more efficient virtual server. And in terms of user interfaces as well – we should continue to modernize UIs to make them more responsive, accessible, and user-friendly.
- I see library systems and services becoming more embedded in users lives: more interoperable with other applications, more accessible from any device, and highly personalized and customizable. In general, I see a major change happening in the world where we are moving “pull” to a “push” society –– we are increasingly letting information come to us, not actively seeking it. – where we actively go out and seek for information, for example, through a web search, to a “push” society, where we let highly personalized information come to us. Instead of traditional web search, I get a notification of a journal article in a journal I follow on my phone. I believe this will fundamentally change how we experience library services over the next 3-5 years.
- So let’s look at these three areas more closely. Our users increasingly expect applications to interoperate. This is a quote from a student survey we did – about how it is annoying to go back and forth between different applications when doing research. We heard this over and over again. I see this need for interoperability beginning to change the traditional role of the systems librarian: instead of maintaining individual systems, we are increasingly called upon to build bridges between systems, to tear down silos, and find creative ways to a seamless user experience.
- One really important growth area in research digital scholarship. Across all disciplines we are seeing researchers want to be able to text mine, perform analysis on huge data sets, access digital collections. The library needs to collaborate and integrate with digital scholarship to support this kind of research. A couple ways I see us doing this: make a commitment that any data we create (and libraries create a lot of data) is open, harvestable, reusable. And also, integrate digital collections and digitized materials into our traditional library systems. An example of this is how we put our visual images into Primo – in a way that was fully embedded, so that users can view the images without linking out to the digital library. This is a picture of Salisbury Cathedral in England, where I am going to be in just a couple days – I get on the plane tomorrow. I’m very excited.
- Whether you are talking about online courses, MOOCs, hybrid, or flipped classrooms, more and more learning is occurring online. In order to provide the convenient, interoperable, point-of-need service students expect, we need to integrate with learning management systems. This is what Northwestern did – integrating Primo with Blackboard.
- I see us providing outstanding access to our library systems and services: access for everyone, from anywhere. For me, accessibility and usability are one and the same thing – if a user can’t access your website, it is not usable. In order to accomplish this, we should partner with the IT accessibility office, ensure we understand their guidelines, and comply with them. We also need to make sure, when licensing new software, that we insist vendors also meet those guidelines. This the WAVE score for your new website – 11 errors not too bad, and I’ll cut you some slack because it’s still in beta.
- But accessibility is more than just how well people can access your website or UI. It is about providing outstanding access to all our library resources. All too often, our users experience problems when trying to get to a resource: the OpenURL fails, they hit a paywall, ezproxy fails. I recently performed a quick and dirty analysis of Primo access problems. The result was not pretty – over 30% failure rate. We need to do better.
- My last point about how library systems are changing is they are becoming more personalized. This is an app that my boyfriend, who is a professor at a med school, has fallen in love with. He admits he no longer uses the library, because this is “so much better.” This app serves up journal articles based on his research interests, he can follow all his favorite journals, he can input his university affiliation and get the PDFs – he loves this. It is not a library application. As a library, we need to be aware that our users are expecting this level of personalized service from us and begin to develop systems to meet that expectation.
- I, on the other hand, use Goodreads. I love the personalization and customization I get. Why can’t my library do this? I’ve included another quote from our student survey – we heard a lot of comments like this.
- So next, I want to look at how we get there. How do we become a systems office that is innovative, and forward thinking, and can support this level of change?
- What kind of tools can we use? And what kind of technology infrastructure do we need to have? As a staff, what do we need to be doing to create this kind of change and what kind of support do we need?
- Lets look at some tools and technologies
- Cloud-based. Virtual servers. SaaS architecture. The pace of change is quick, dynamic. We need to prioritize keeping on top of that change.
- We need to ensure a secure online environment for the BC community. Close relationship with IT security office. Good understanding of policy. Regular review of library systems for compliance. We need to make security a priority.
- We need good tools that make working together work better. Always a challenge – I’m always looking for good, new collaborative tools. Here are a few tools I’ve used for project management, ticketing, versioning, and communication. Collaboration really doesn’t work if we don’t have the right collaborative spaces.
- Make assessment part of everything we do - ubiquitous. Make it easy to use and accessible for all library staff, and all systems and services. Build useful and usable data dashboards. UMN presentation. Experimenting with interactive data visualization – test data set from the Primo access problem data I showed earlier.
- Put users at the center of everything we do. Get users involved early on. And not just asking users for feedback on systems – understand what they want, how they operate in the wild. I’m currently involved in a study that is doing just that – the “research confession booth” is exactly what it looks like: a place where we sit people down and ask them to show us how they do research. And trust me, it is fascinating.
- Collaborate with one another – getting all stakeholders in the same room, bringing together different expertise. Collaborate across depts – e.g with Alumni office, IT authentication team, and library.
- I’ve been lucky enough to chair a committee at Harvard that has funding to bring in outside people to talk about what they’re doing. Collaborate across institutions – ed group, bringing in people from other institutions to learn from each other. We all walked away with new ideas. Very very powerful.
- Change can be scary and hard. We need to make it as easy a possible – for ourselves, and for our users. One way to make it less scary is to keep the change management process open and transparent. Communicate about projects early and often – love the marketing you have done around your new website, giving users opportunities to see the work in progress, comment, etc. I would love to have monthly open forums where people could “ask a systems librarian.”
- Lastly, I want to talk about how we can foster a culture of innovation. For me, this means having a safe environment where we can have crazy ideas, where you’re encouraged to have crazy ideas – nobody’s going to shut you down. Where you can try things, and yes, sometimes fail. That, I believe, is the only way true innovation happens.
- I believe that we need to be continuously learning to keep up with the pace of technology change. This means staff need to be given the time, and the resources, to learn. It is an investment that will pay off.
- I want to encourage staff to be creative, to create new services – and have a place where that can happen. At Harvard this can happen at the Library Innovation Lab – a place for entrepreneurship, for “startups.” Some of them fail, but some of them successfully implemented campus-wide.
- And lastly, we need places to simply play. Sandboxes, where staff are encouraged to try something new that they know nothing about. If someone want to learn Python, and experiment with some scripting, and they need some web server space, but they don’t want to do it in our production systems, we should be able to support that. Spin up an inexpensive AWS instance where that can happen. This is how we learn, this is how we grow, and this is how we innovate.
- So that is my vision for library systems and services over the next 3-5 years. I believe that if we work together, both within and outside the institution, and create a culture of innovation where we allow ourselves to take risks, be creative, and learn new things, we can successfully build the library systems that will enable tomorrow’s scholars to succeed. [next slide]