Work projects

There are a few things going on at work at the moment, some are 'not so great' such as the news that the institution is addressing a financial shortfall which needs to be resolved before the end of 2027. Many other institutions in the region (Aust.) are going through similar issues and a lot of changes are being made. A huge investigation into all processes across the University and while the focus is on reducing operational costs and identifying new revenue opportunities, the flow on effect is that everyone is nervous about how it will all impact their roles and ultimately 'whether I will continue to be employed?'. I suppose the positive thing is that there are a number of other projects going on that is keeping me very busy so I don't have much time to dwell on the potential impending doom.
A quick summary of the things keeping me busy are:

• Our new Primo NDE instance
• LibGuides move to BootStrap5
• Annual Subscription review process
• Student management system implementation

Primo NDE is an interesting one. A new version of the Library catalogue search interface has us working through a range of different areas to make sure the look and feel stays similar while also taking advantage of the new functionality. We have always tried to stay pretty close to out of the box so that when versions are released we don't have to do too much testing of custom built code but as with any new interface there is a lot of work to get it up to the level we want. I have been working primarily on the html and CSS customisations - there is the home page, custom headers and footers, styling the buttons, links, etc. which I have really enjoyed and now we are looking at how we can integrate some of the other functionality that we used to have such as chat widgets and the ability to report bugs, etc. It is a project that the whole Library has been involved in, which I have really enjoyed as it brings all the areas together when we often operate in our own little silos. Looking forward to going live with the new environment soon and seeing if the staff and students find it more useful than the previous iteration.

LibGuides is another one where I have had the opportunity to use my html and CSS knowledge to the test - trying to make the new interface as similar to the current branded web environment has been a fun challenge. With so many different templates, I am not sure I have fixed them all and anticipate a lot of last minute fixes for stuff we didn't initially find but I love that kind of web tinkering so looking forward to it!

Annual subscription review is probably my least favourite thing, I have set up a shared spreadsheet for the whole subscriptions team to capture different categories of data related to Library subscriptions. This includes cost, usage, cost-per-use (which is our primary method of identifying library subscriptions for cancellation), ease-of-use, content duplication, Inter-library-loan options, purchase options, accessibility, etc. This data is then aggregated (with weighting to be determined once we have entered all the data) to calculate an overall score. Generally speaking subscriptions increase about 5% per year however our budget does not so this is how we make sure that we hit our resourcing budget while also ensuring we provide the most relevent information resources for learning, teaching and research. Trying to improve our ability to make data-driven decisions but with so many variables and custom cases sometimes I wonder if its a bit overkill and we are wasting precious time by collecting data on all the additional categories.

Lastely I wanted to mention the change in our Student Management System. This is a massive project across the entire University and while the library do not do much with regards to the onboarding and ongoing management of student records - its impact on identity management and system access is something that we are involved in. It is one of those things that happens behind the scenes - when a student accesses a journal or database, the whole process of authentication should be invisible to the student, there may be a login screen but then depending on whether it is through a proxy server or SSO and credentials being released to the vendor platform, it all should be seamless to the student so there isn't much visibility when you get it all right and it works. Sadly the amount of work, especially solution design and testing is huge and time consuming - while it is very necessary, it doesn't have the same level of impact as something like a new library catalogue search interface.

I recently also had to fix our learning commons PS5 - whoever took it out of its secure case last, when they put it back in, they forgot to plug in the USB hub that was charging the controllers. Eventually the batteries died and we started to get complaints from students that they couldn't play games. While it took a few days to figure out who had the keys to the security case, it ended up being an easy fix and a nice break from the usual day-to-day tasks.