What’s happening at your library?
- Valley City – have hired more student employees. They are working on displays and collaborating with staff for social media and many other things.
- Minot State – their purchasing associate at the library moved over to the business office. The rest of the staff are splitting her work.
- UND – The systems position has been empty since last March. Shelby has done quite a bit of the work for that position, and between her and Will they are piecing it together. The job is open until filled, so if you know any people great for systems that want to work for Chester Fritz, let them know! Also, the library has a movie night scheduled next week. The library is trying a few things to get more people into the library for a fun reason. The students are finding the library after COVID and the remodel, both of which were keeping students away. The are coming in now, using the library to study and for projects, so the library is in good shape from that standpoint.
- Mayville State – When the Traill County Tribune went defunct, the library ended up getting their collection of newspapers: Traill County Tribune, Portland Republican, Mayville Farmer, many different newspapers. They weren’t organized, so students are organizing them and figuring out what dates they have. Kelly is using Chat GPT to figure out the date of every Thursday in 1927 for example. Also, Mayville State is remodeling the Old Main building, which is very nice but needs a lot of work. The administration is moving into the library during the remodel.
- NDSU – The campus has switched over to Zoom phones, and they are switching everyone by department. They have been doing renovations at the library, and they should be finished in about a month. There is some new office space and public space. They have been doing a green glass weeding project which is an OCLC collection analysis service. It has been kind of a slow start, and it is hard to do when you don’t have a lot of people in the library to work on it. There’s lots of stuff to do, but they have so many vacant positions right now. They have two posted director-level positions, and there will be more coming after that. They have a Health Science library in Bismarck which is on a separate system, Tiny Cat for probably five or six years. Its records were on Aleph, and at the time we couldn’t bring them into Alma, and now we can. She anticipates a push to just get the records into Alma, and then they’ll have to figure out a training component for our staff person out there.
- Trinity – One of their sister schools, SAGU in Texas, recently won an innovative award for creating a free process for anyone to do original cataloging. She’s anxious to have some spare time to learn how to do this. Here is a link: https://www.acl.org/acl-award-for-excellence-in-innovation/
- NDSCS – They have had a couple of instructional sessions and hired a new student employee. They’ve had a recent reorganization, and the library now falls under the Director of Teaching, Learning & Innovation, Tara Bladow.
- BSC – They have a “power hour” from 3:00 to 4:00 o’clock most days where they have puzzles available and games that students can play just to give them a chance to relax. It is fun to watch people come in and use the library in a different way. Cataloging has been pretty steady, and she’s been doing a lot of work in the archives digitizing materials. They have a partnership with the State Historical Society to digitize the student newspaper, and hopefully that will be completed and available in April, and they plan to have a big splash during National Library Week. Earlier today she met with the athletic department about getting videos of basketball games accessible online as well.
Tickets with Ex Libris:
- Sharing NZ data with IZs for analytics – I finally received an update about this. The only subject area that is shared with IZs is E-Inventory, and the folder is “Portfolio details for consortia members.”
New Topics: Release Notes:
- In the November 2023 release, Ex Libris released Pendo to all environments. It is a digital tool that records workflows and Ex Libris is using it to identify areas in Alma that users struggle with. The data is anonymized, and no personal data is recorded. To read more about Pendo, see: https://knowledge.exlibrisgroup.com/Alma/Release_Notes/2023/Alma_2023_R… If you decide to turn Pendo off, go to Configuration > General > General Configuration > Digital Adoption.
- Analytics Data Visualization – Insight dashboards for Books Retention and Books Deselection. Ben showed how to access the data visualizations for book retention and book deselection, and the various tabs and filters available. Shelby noticed that it doesn’t include SUDOC classification, and they have more things with SUDOC numbers than they do with LC. Ben also noticed that this doesn’t work well for North Dakota documents because many of them are listed as serials.
- New match method in import profiles – You can now match against records in a specific electronic collection, which reduces multi-matches and avoids the risk of incorrect overlays of records. We discussed whether this was only for local electronic collections or not. We suspect this is the likely use for it, but the documentation doesn’t say.
- Configuring additional physical item conditions. Configuration > Resources > General > Physical Item Condition. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRCUwBFn-Vg
- Filtering a set of holdings records with an indication rule.
- Deletion of Community Zone originated records – Users are now able to delete a Network Zone bibliographic record from the Institution/Network tab, even if the record has its origins in the Community Zone.
- Automatic Upload Electronic Holdings from Taylor & Francis (Journals) – When activated this process automatically downloads a file with your holdings information from the Taylor & Francis platform and updates your holdings in the Taylor & Francis collection. This integration eliminates the need for manual updates when the Taylor & Francis side makes changes. For more information: https://knowledge.exlibrisgroup.com/Alma/Product_Documentation/010Alma_…;
- We decided to table the discussion of linked open data for another time.