Listservs, jQuery, Putting out a Fire

Three very odd things I ran across this week:

1. So we got an email from a vendor informing us they were moving to https: and we needed to update our EZproxy stanzas accordingly. Well, like most systems folks, or maybe not, I took the addition to EZproxy, and added it to the config. Well on the EZproxy listserv, one person was smart enough to scan through all of the configurations and sure enough in one of the entries, the vendor had left out the "s" in the after the HTTP in the URL. A nice catch, that without the listserv post by that librarian, we probably would not have noticed for quite some time.
   
2. I started looking a the way we could use and integrate some of the bootstrap features, Randall Sean Harrison has created here. One I jumped on that I really like is the accordion feature to hide content and only expand when you need to see it. Basically, his code builds all of the frameworks for you, and then you can paste into a CMS or system like libguides which is built on bootstrap. Well I put one it, and it worked great, and then I wanted to do an information tooltip one. But I could not get it to work, and as I started looking around this feature actually should have been already working in libguides. Well, since we were loading some of the campus javascript it was conflicting with the libguides javascript. Of course, no one ever knew or even tried to use the tooltip feature below. So it's interesting how one adventure, can lead you to into discovering you actually had more tools than you thought available.
   
3.  Finally, to wrap up the week, we had a great lecture at Colloquium today by Luke Ettinger, on the research he is doing. However, the real excitement occurred walking back to the library. Coming across the millstream, we noticed one of the music secretaries on the side of the library putting out a small fire with a fire extinguisher. Some students were guessing, must have dumped some hot ashes in the area outside the 24-hour study room just by the stairs. I worked with a campus safety officer, bailing some water from out of the millstream to finish putting it out. A very odd way to end the week.

Open Source Publications, Collection Reports, Unpaywall

Well, another week is done and all sorts of fun.

1.  I thought it might be a good idea to add a new collection for our Atkinson school of works created by their faculty and published in Open Source Publications. Web of Science is great for setting up alerts, as you can set an alert for Open Access titles and organization of the author Willamette.
   
   
   
   So I checked with our Atkinson liaison, and he loved the idea. So I made the collection, got it all set up. Populated it with the article, and all set to go but then I get well we never really officially said we would add this collection. Ugggh, other departments at the CLA level already have these types of collections. Let's highlight the work our faculty or doing, by making it easier for people to find.
   
2. I created a couple of special collection reports for our humanities and fine arts librarian.  In doing it I got to use Analytics and I used the option to turn on local parameters for certain bib fields. So now in our instance of Analytics with ExLibris the following local parameters:
   
   Local Param 01 = 300
   Local Param 02 = 590
   Local Param 03 = 655
   
   It would be great if we could re-label those Local Param fields, but we'll just have to remember we have customized them. Documented in Confluence, but you know how that goes.
   
3. A nice new feature in Alma, and very easy to turn on. It will now automatically show if the doi from an article matches a resource from Unpaywall. I was going to turn on a primo add on that Lewis & Clark wrote for the resolver which basically does this, but this is so much easier to turn on. Two sorts of odd things with the add on, unfortunately, you can't control how it opens. One method it only opens into a new tab, another method it opens in the same window. And unfortunately, if that is an HTTP resource, you get an error message as the https server is trying to serve HTTP content. So it still needs a little fine-tuning from ExLibris, but a very nice addition.
   
   
   
   
   
   

Error Reporting, Open Educational Resources, Comma to Column

So here are three lessons learned this week.

1. Although something may appear like its working, there is always a slight possibility that it may not be. I was working on a PHP script that would export all of our librarian's instructions sessions from a MySQL database. It should have been pretty straight forward, but the code was older and I had not used it in a while. Well, I thought it was working as it did export the data, the only problem was there was a loop in the script that was continually writing to our error_log file. It's a good thing our web server was smart enough to shut it down, but not before it ate all the space up on our server. We had to throw out some very large error log files, but nothing super serious. Still not a bad idea to check in on your error log file once in a while when you are working on new coding.
   
2. So during our Alliance systems meeting this week we had a great presentation from Heather White and Holly Wheeler both from Mount Hood Community College, they have been doing a lot of incredible work with Open Educational Resources (OER), and were great presenters. They come from the "technical services" side of the Alliance, but I felt they had a great topic and something that we on the systems side could learn about. They did not disappoint, and it reinforces the need for us to all work together across teams.
   
3. This last nugget is sort of a no brainer. When you are trying to accomplish something new to you and sort of techy, always "Google" it first. So I had a list of attendees to a meeting all in paragraph form separated by commas. What I really want to do at our next Systems Open meeting is to give away two Starbucks cards in a random drawing using numbers by the names of the people, so if I had all the names in a spreadsheet column that would be easy to assign numbers to. Sure enough, there is a web site, that allows you to input a comma list, and have it all be in one column you can just paste into an Excel file. Major time saver!

ExLibris Initiatives, ILLiad in Primo, and Windows 7

Another week winding down, this time finishing the week in Portland in a meeting with ExLibris and the Alliance. I was invited to attend the meeting on the initiatives by Lori Hildebrandt in charge of Resource Sharing. I currently do not do a lot with Resource Sharing, but I have a lot of knowledge of our history with ExLibris in Resource Sharing. It also worked out very well with my football officiating, as I was assigned a game in Colton which is just south of Portland, so I can easily make it by game time. ExLibris was also willing to at least make a request by us, to look at removing one they had suggested for one we felt was more important.

The second item this week was finishing up installing the ILLiad Primo integration that Lewis & Clark developed. Since I was looking at our ILLiad API last week to try and track down other issues for Liz, I decided to grab the code from Jeremy and update it for our instance of Alma and Illiad. Now in place, it allows users to see their outstanding requests, and to directly see their articles.

Our campus is phasing out all of our Windows 7 machines, and we currently have about 10 still in use. For most of our machines, upgrading to Windows 10 is not going to be an issue, just an issue with reinstalling the software on the systems. So I have begun looking at all of our software on those specific machines, and unfortunately, we have two software packages that only will run on Windows 7. We currently have one machine which is non-networked which may have to be the landing zome for one of these programs which may not require network access to run, but one of the programs definitely is still going to be a hot topic issue come January.

CSS Bullets libguides, ILLiad, Facebook App

Well, a busy week as I finally got around to doing a couple things I should have done a long time ago. First, we have not had ordered list display properly in libguides since we brought over the campus-style sheets for the look and feel.

What I would run into, when I would display the bullets, is a double bullet in our regular lists, and then in the book lists, you would get a bullet but the object in the list like a book would be pushed to the next line. Finally got the single bullets correct, but the issue with pushing down content in a new div element still existed.

So I needed to isolate the book list ul li combinations, I was able to do that. But once I got that figured out, it turns out there are like three other lists like these ones for web sites, and another for RSS feeds. Hopefully, I'm not missing any other lists. I think I have them all fixed with the following CSS additions.

/ ** Bulleted List Cleanup **/

.s-lg-col-boxes ul li {

-webkit-margin-before: 1em;

-webkit-margin-after: 1em;

-webkit-margin-start: 0px;

-webkit-margin-end: 0px;

-webkit-padding-start: 8px;

}

.s-lg-col-boxes ul>li:before {

content: '\2022';

display: inline-block;

color: #c0ac7e;

font-size: 1.5em;

vertical-align: middle;

margin: 0 .2em 0 0;

line-height: .9;

position: relative;

top: -2px;

}

ul.s-lg-link-list.s-lg-link-list-5 li:before {

display: none;

}

ul.s-lg-link-list.s-lg-link-list-2 li:before {

display: none;

}

ul.s-lg-rss-list li:before {

display: none;

}

While working on this issue, I also had a staff member working with ILLiad software to send ILL articles out to other libraries using a tool called Odyssey. What is really weird is that it takes like 2-3 minutes to send the article, when in the past it was pretty much just automatic. Nothing has really changed other than we did have her desktop re-imaged and had to reinstall the software. So it definitely seems like a Windows issue, and we are still working on a solution. One thought I'm going to have her try is to first open the article in Adobe Acrobat, and then have her try and send it.  

Finally, I have been going back and forth with Facebook over our app which we use to display our library posts on our main page. So it's really not an app, but just a feature on our website. It's a feature if it was not available would not break our hearts, but well try to jump through their hoops, as they tell us how we can access the posts. The one bright thing from this is I got to learn how to use QuickTime on the mac to create a screencast, it's very straightforward and puts it in a .mov file format so it can be submitted to Facebook. Update our Facebook app which needed manage pages has been approved.

Logs, Customizations, and Omeka

Challenging week, and I'm not sure my fix is in place yet, but it seems like it could be the cause of my current challenge with ILLiad. So are incoming borrowing requests on ILLiad, coming in on Article Exchange were not automatically processing when they came in. So I was thinking all kinds of different things with a recent server move, and after struggling with it for a couple days, I remembered that there are some great logs on the ILLiad server.

I then found this:

2019-10-17 09:10:11,502 [29] INFO AtlasSystems.ILLiad.DomainLogic.Sites - Adding ILL as parent site (Request ID: e65ad5e2-c52f-467b-a752-fccf156bd81e)
2019-10-17 09:10:11,502 [29] WARN AtlasSystems.ILLiad.DomainLogic.Sites - Found empty or NULL NVTGC value (Request ID: e65ad5e2-c52f-467b-a752-fccf156bd81e)
2019-10-17 09:10:11,502 [29] INFO AtlasSystems.ILLiad.DomainLogic.Templates.Notification.NotificationTemplateService - Retrieving Borrowing Electronic Delivery template for site ILL. (Request ID: e65ad5e2-c52f-467b-a752-fccf156bd81e)
2019-10-17 09:10:11,502 [29] INFO AtlasSystems.ILLiad.DomainLogic.Sites - Adding ILL as parent site (Request ID: e65ad5e2-c52f-467b-a752-fccf156bd81e)
2019-10-17 09:10:11,518 [29] WARN AtlasSystems.ILLiad.DomainLogic.Sites - Found empty or NULL NVTGC value (Request ID: e65ad5e2-c52f-467b-a752-fccf156bd81e

So I decided to look for "Found empty or NULL NVTGC value", and was lucky enough to find this document from Atlas on when you have just one ILLiad server to use this on your new user form:

<input type="hidden" name="NVTGC" value="ILL">

and sure enough it was on my previous form, and I had failed to bring over the customization when we customized the user registration form. There were about 30 people who have registered since we updated the form, and Liz was able to easily identify those folks and update them. So note to self, if you have customized something in the past make sure you carry your customizations forward.

Finally had an Omeka session that seemed to go rather well. I walked the students through the presentation until I got to the actual steps of creating collections, items, and exhibits. I then would just go over each of the slides as I had already demonstrated the steps. I then had handouts for the students to use, and they went about creating their collections, items, and exhibits. Both the instructor and I both agreed Omeka is really something that you just have to use to get the hang of it, and it seemed like a very productive session.

Google Form Add Ons, Accessibility Audits, and SSL

So these were my three main points of focus this week:

1. As I finished up GamePlan this year, I needed to send out the assessment survey. I'm not a real big fan of sending the survey out the week after the quiz and the program should really be over, and I think it hurts my response rate just a bit. So this year, I got 43 out of 114 back, so just over 37%, not that great. The year before I a little over 50%, and I think that was due to the fact that I would just send them straight to a survey after the form. With the move to a Google Quiz this year, I had lost that option. So I was talking with a fellow football official who makes use of Google Forms at his work and he mentioned there is a number fo Google Form add ons. I ended up using one that was authorized by our Google Site Admins. What a time-saver, it now sends out a follow-up email after the quiz is submitted. I'm going to be curios next year where my response rate on the survey will come in at.
   
2. Doing some work on our web site to improve the accessibility, I had been using the WAVE tool extension, and then Mike mentioned to also use the Google Developer Audit for Accessibility, I went with Mike's tool and our main page had a score of like 65, not that great, but with the addition of some alt tags to our photos, and some aria-labels to the search boxes, I was able to get the score up to an 86. The last two items that need to be fixed really can not be changed right now. I did notice the WAVE tool was able to also check the javascript hidden panels, where the Developer audit only did what was on the screen. Most likely I will continue to use both in conjunction with each other.
   
3. Finally, in working on a "Best Practices" libguide, I was reminded of our need to get all of our guides to only contain content from SSL servers. At some point soon, libguides is going to force all of our content to be from SSL, it's time to get a jump on these guides and correct them. Now I just also need to convince some of the library producers of our libguides to limit linking to images coming from SSL servers. 

Google Quiz, Mysqli and Bind, Alma Skin

A good week for saving some work and time on different projects.

1. I finally decided to flip my GamePlan quiz, which I send to all the student-athletes that go through my GamePlan program at Willamette. In the past, I had just used a campus mail form script to capture quiz answers, have them emailed to me, and then I would have to compare the results to the correct answers and tally the totals. Now by flipping my Google Form to a quiz, Google takes care of all that work for me. When the student-athlete finishes the quiz, they get immediate feedback on their result, and their score is also captured in the response sheet.
   
2. Finally got back to some coding this week, and did some more converting of some php mysql to now use the binding technique to eliminate any chance of SQL injection into our database.
   
3. On Friday morning we had a librarian at Oregon State who had an issue reported to him about the Summit request form not properly displaying. He knew it was most likely something in the CSS he was going to have to fix but was unsure of where that was maintained. Is it in Primo or in Alma? This is an odd one, at first, I was going to see if anyone else was going to jump in with an answer but after not seeing anything on it for 30 minutes I decided to get my brain around the issue. So, the alma delivery skin, is actually uploaded in the Alma interface and its setting as to which file you can use is set in the Primo Back Office tables. Jesse Thomas at WWU also reminded us that some of the elements on that form can now be controlled from the Alma interface as well. Always nice to see how the Alliance can work together as a team.

Back to Blogging

Not exactly sure why I stopped blogging back in January, but as I went to complete my annual report, I realized how nice to have documentation of what I worked on over the year.

Let's see, highlights for this week included doing a better job with my time management skills thanks to LinkedIn Learning, fishing up the 14th year of my GamePlan program with freshman student-athletes at Willamette, and I had to write up four strategic initiative reports for the Alliance systems team.

My main focus this last week has been to wrangle in our LibGuides a bit, its a great product for librarians to use, but it requires care and maintenance like any web page. The biggest challenge this week was updating the over 500 links to our previous catalog which we replaced in 2013. So yeah, we need to do a better job of housekeeping on the site.