Tag Archives: anzreg2018

Primo out of the box #anzreg2018

Primo out of the box: Making the box work for you
Stacey Van Groll, UQ

Core philosophy – maintain out-of-the-box unless there’s a strong use case, user feedback, or bug. Focus on core high-use features like basic search (rather than browse) and search refinement (rather than my account). Stable and reliable discovery interface; quick and seamless resource access.

Said yes to:

UQ stylesheet – one search scope, oneview, one tab, their own prefilters on library homepage (a drop-down menu – includes some Primo things like newspaper search, some non-Primo things)

Said no to:

Journals A-Z
Citation linker
Purchase requests
main menu
EBSCO API
Featured Results
Collection Discovery
Tags & Reviews
Database search (for now)
Newspaper search (for now)
Resource recommender (for now)

Dev work for some things – eg tweaked the log out functionality to address an issue; then Primo improved something, which broke their fix; fixed the fix; next release was okay; next release broke it again; so have reviewed and gone back to out-of-the-box. An example of the downsides to making tweaks.

But sometimes really need to make a change – consider the drivers, good use cases, who and how many people experience the problem, how much work it is to make/develop the change and how much work to maintain it? Is there existing functionality in the product or on the Roadmap? How do you measure success?

Does environmental scans – has bookmarks of other Primo NewUI sites to see what else other people do and how.

Data analysis – lots of bugs in My Account but also very low usage. So doesn’t put much work in, just submits a Salesforce case then forgets.

Evaluates new releases – likes to piggyback on these eg adding OA and peer-reviewed tags to institutional repository norm rules.

User feedback – classify by how common the complaint is and try to address most common.

Feedback:

first goes to Knowledge Centre Feedback feature and includes email address which forces a response
second listserv
third Salesforce, and then escalation channels if needed

Lessons learned: A good salesforce case has a single problem, include screenshots, explain what behaviour you desire.

Ex Libris company / product updates #anzreg2018

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Ex Libris company update
Bar Veinstein, President Ex Libris

in 85 of top 100 unis; 65million api calls/month; percentage of new sales that are in cloud up from 16% in 2009 to 96% in 2017; 92% customer satisfaction
Pivot for exploration of funding/collaboration https://www.proquest.com/products-services/Pivot.html
aim to develop solutions sustainably so not a proliferation of systems for developing needs
looking at more AI to develop recommendation eg “high patron demand for 8 titles. review and purchase?”, “based on usage patterns, you should move 46 titles from closed stacks to open shelves?”, “your interloans rota needs load balancing, configure now?”, “you’ve got usage from vendors who provide SUSHI accounts you haven’t set up yet, do that now?”, algorithms around SUSHI vs usage.
serious about retaining Primo/Summon; shared content and metadata
Primo VE – realtime updates. Trying to reduce complexity of Primo Back Office (pipes etc – but unclear what replaces this when pipes are “all gone”)
RefWorks not just for end user but also aggregated analytics on cloud platform. Should this be connected/equal to eshelf on Primo?
Leganto – ‘wanting to get libraries closer to teaching and learning’ – tracking whether instructors are actually using it and big jumps between semesters.
developing app services (ux, workflow, collaboration, analytics, shared data) and infrastructure services (agile, multi-tenancy, open apis, metadata schemas, auth) on top of cloud platform – if you’ve got one thing with them very quick to implement another because they already know how you’re set up.
principles of openness: more transactions now via api than staff direct action.
https://trust.exlibrisgroup.com/
Proquest issues – ExL & PQ passing the customer service buck, so to align this. Eg being able to transfer support cases directly across between Salesforce instances.

Ex Libris prodct presentation
Oren Beit-Arie, Ex Libris Chief Strategy Officer

1980s acquisitions not part of library systems -> integrated library systems
2000s e-resource mgmt not part of ILS -> library services platform (‘unified resource mgmt system’)
now teaching/learning/research not part of LSPs -> … Ex Libris’s view of a cloud ‘higher education platform’
Leganto
– course reading lists; copyright compliance; integration with Alma/Primo/learning management system
– improve teaching and learning experience; student engagement; library efficiency; compliance; maximise use of library collections
– Alma workflows, creation of OpenURLs…
Esploro
– in dev
– RIMs
– planning – discovery and analysis – writing – publication – outreach – assessment
– researchers (publish, publish, publish); librarians (provide research services); research office (increase research funding/impact)
– [venn diagram] research admin systems [research master]; research data mgmt systems [figshare]; institutional repositories [dspace]; current research information systems [elements]
– pain points for rseearchers: too may systems, overhead, lack of incentive, hard to keep public profile up to date
– for research office – research output of the uni, lack of metrics, hard to track output and impact, risk of noncompliance
– next gen research repository: all assets; automated capture (don’t expect all content to be in repository); enrichment of metadata
– showcase research via discovery/portals; automated researcher profiles; research benchmarks/metrics
– different assets including creative works, research data, activities
– metadata curation and enrichment (whether direct deposit, mediated deposit, automatic capture) through partnerships with other parties (data then flows both ways, with consent)
– guiding principles: not to change researchers’ habits; not to create more work for librarians; not to be another ‘point solution’ (interoperable)
– parses pdf from upload for metadata (also checks against Primo etc). Keywords suggested based on researcher profile
– deposit management, apc requests, dmp management etc in “Research” tab on Alma
– allows analytics of eg journals in library containing articles published by faculty
– tries to track relationships with datasets
– public view essentially a discovery layer (it’s very Primo NewUI with bonus document viewer – possibly just an extra view) for research assets – colocates article with related dataset
– however have essentially ruled research administration systems out of scope as starting where their strength is. Do have Pivot however.

EZproxy log monitoring with Splunk for security management #anzreg2018

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Ingesting EZproxy logs into Splunk. Proactive security breach management and generating rich eResource metrics
Linda Farrall, Monash University

Use Alma analytics for usage, but also using EZproxy logs.

EZProxy is locally hosted and administered by library/IT. On- and off-campus access is through EZproxy where possible, and Monash has always used EZproxy logs to report on access statistics. (For some vendors it’s the only stats available.) Used a Python script to generate html and CSV files.

Maintenance hard, logs bigger so execution took longer, python libraries no longer supported, skewed statistics due to EZproxy misuse/compromised accounts. So moved to Splunk (already had enterprise version at university) to ingest logs; can then enrich with faculty data, and improve detection of compromised accounts.

EZproxy misuse – mostly excessive downloads, eg using script or browser plugin – related to study but the amount triggers vendor Concerns (ie block all university access) – in this case check in with user to make sure it was them and sort out the issue. Or compromised accounts due to phishing. Have created a process to identify issues and block the account until ITS educates the user (because phishing emails will get sent to the same person who fell for it last time).

Pre-Splunk, it was time-consuming to monitor logs and investigate. Python script monitoring downloads no longer worked due to change of file size/number involved in typical download.

Most compromised accounts from Canada, US, Europe – in Splunk can look at reports where a user has bounced between a few countries within one week. Can look at total download size (file numbers, file size) – and can then join these two reports to look for accounts downloading a lot from a lot of countries.

To investigate have to go into identity management accounts – but can then see all their private data. Once they integrate faculty information into Splunk they don’t have to look them up so can actually enhance privacy – can see downloading lots of engineering data but are actually in engineering faculty so probably okay.

In 2016 had 10 incidents with resources blocked by vendors for 26 days. In 2017 16 incidents (all before August when started using Splunk). In 2018, 0 incidents of blocking – because they’re staying on top of compromised accounts (identifying an average of 4 a week) and taking pre-emptive action (see an issue, block the account, notify the vendor). Also now have a very good relationship with IEEE! (Notes that when IEEE alerts you to an issue it’s always a compromised account, there’s never any other explanation.)

Typically account compromised; tested quietly over several days; then sold on and used heavily. If a university hasn’t been targeted yet, it will be. By detecting accounts downloading data, are also protecting the university from other damage they can cause to university systems.

Notes that each university will have different patterns of normal use: you get to know your own data.

Lots of vendors moving to SSO. Plan to do SSO through EZproxy – haven’t done it yet so not sure it’ll work or not but testing it within a couple of months. ITS will implement SSO logging for the university, so hopefully they’ll pick up issues before it gets to EZproxy. Actively asking vendors to do it through IP recognition/EZproxy.

E-resource usage analytics in Alma #anzreg2018

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“Pillars in the Mist: Supporting Effective Decision-making with Statistical Analysis of SUSHI and COUNTER Usage Reports
Aleksandra Petrovic, University of Auckland

Increasing call for evidence-based decision making in combination with rising importance of e-resources (from 60% -> 87% of collection in last ten years), in context of decreasing budget and changes in user behaviour.

Options: EBSCO usage consolidations, Alma analytics or Journal Usage Statistics Portal (JUSP). Pros of Alma: no additional fees; part of existing system; no restrictions for historical records; could modify/enhance reports; could have input in future development. But does involve more work than other systems.

Workflow: harvest data by manual methods; automatic receipt of reports, mostly COUNTER; receipt by email. All go into Alma Analytics, then create reports, analyse, make subscription decisions.

Use the Pareto Principle eg 20% of vendors responsible for 80% of usage. Similarly 80% of project time spent in data gathering creates 20% of business value; 20% of time spent in analysis for 80% of value.

Some vendors slow to respond (asking at renewal time increased their motivation….) Harvesting bugs eg issue with JR1. There were reporting failures (especially in move from http to https) and issues tracking the harvesting. Important to monitor what data is being harvested before basing decisions on it! Alma provides a “Missing data” view but can’t export into Excel to filter so created a similar report on Alma Analytics (which they’re willing to share).

So far have 106 SUSHI, 45 manual COUNTER vendors and 17 non-COUNTER vendors. Got stats from 85% of vendors.

Can see trends in open access usage. Can compare whether users are using recent vs older material – drives decisions around backfiles vs rolling embargos. Can look at usage for titles in package – eg one where only three titles had high usage so just bought those and cancelled package.

All reports in one place. Can be imported into Tableau for display/visualisation: a nice cherry on the top.

Cancelling low-use items / reducing duplication has saved money. Hope more vendors will use SUSHI to increase data available. If doing it again would:

use a generic contact email for gathering data
use the dashboard earlier in the project

Cost per use trickier to get out – especially with exchange rate issues but also sounds like reports don’t quite match up in Alma.

Alma plus JUSP
Julie Wright, University of Adelaide

Moved from using Alma Analytics to JUSP – to both. Timeline:

Manual analysis of COUNTER: very time intensive: 2-3 weeks each time and wanted to do it monthly…
UStat better but only SUSHI, specific reports, and no integration with Alma Analytics
Alma Analytics better still but still needs monitoring (see above-mentioned https issues)
JUSP – only COUNTER/SUSHI, reports easy and good, but can’t make your own

Alma	JUST
much work	easy
complex analyses available	only simple reports
only has 12 months data	data back to 2014
benchmarking	works with vendors on issues quality control of data

JUSP also has its own SUSHI server – so can harvest from here into Alma. This causes issues with duplicate data when the publishers don’t match exactly. Eg JUSP shows “BioOne” when there are actually various publishers; or “Wiley” when Alma has “John Wiley and Sons”. Might need to delete all Alma data and use only JUSP data.