COUNTER5, Shibboleth, and Marketing Pays Off...

Two topics dominated the work week for me this week.

1. First was the move of many of our vendor accounts in Alma to COUNTER5 reports, I'm still not sure which ones exactly we are going to need, so I'm not requesting as many reports as I could be. It's also extremely frustrating when it looks like you have all the proper credentials and everything set up and you go to harvest the accounts and nothing works. This move is taking longer than I expected, and the number of vendors, who tell you what credentials you need, and you follow those to a tee, and they still fail, is really growing.
   
2. Along with COUNTER5 this week has been more work on Shibboleth login for our database and journal vendors. Some work super smooth, others require more attributes than we currently release to the vendors. So my workflow has been, verify we have all of COUNTER4 for the last year, then I try and set up COUNTER5, if I have success, I then remove all the COUNTER4 jobs, and verify we have all the reports working as needed. Still not one-hundred percent on the COUNTER5 reports we will be needing.
   
3. Finally, one side note. I was notified that a student had signed up for a Library Workshop, it was the first time that form was used and she had noticed our marketing in the library bathroom signage. Tells me that method may work, but she also told me she did not know the library offers this service. Tells me we need to do a better job of letting the students know the services available to them.

InCommon, Windows 7, and Alliance Work

Wow, being back from two-weeks of holiday vacation can leave you with a lot to work on. So this week three big topics.

1. The first being our interest in InCommon, which we actually have been a member of for quite some time it's just the library was not really involved with our joining so some of the possible benefits that we might have gotten from InCommon, such as using SAML/Shibboleth authentication for SSO we have not realized. So now we are going through all of our 50 or so database vendors and seeing which we can possibly switch over to, and not have to run through EZproxy for off-campus access anymore. This should be a fun project. Well also be applying to a lot of the tools we use like Alma and Primo.
   
2. One of the projects we were working with WITS our campus IT staff with over the winter break was upgrading or removing the final five Windows 7 machines that we have in the library. Unfortunately, we have three machines/software tools that are not going to be able to run on Windows 10. I have created workarounds with non-networked PCs for two of the systems (a micro printer and another for the bindery software), but Sara's CONTENTdm software may not have any place to live if that computer has to be on the network. As IT is not going to allow any Windows 7 machines. We will see what happens next week.
   
3. Finally, Alliance work is picking up and along with the Central Analytics Work Group, I have also been doing some of the work for the Alma Release Testing Group. I'm just not certain however, how important is the work we are doing for it. It's great for me to go over all the new features in Alma, like being able to use COUNTER5, but I'm not sure how much use the documents we create get used.