Week 9 - Fall 2018 (Kaltura, ArchiveSpace, Google Tag Manager)

Here are three systems related tasks/actions for the ninth week of the fall semester.

1. This week I was dealing with a Kaltura player and playlist that we wanted to be responsive to its layout. Well, I spent way too much time on this one trying to customize the player and playlist using HTML and the Kaltura API. As it turned out, it was already in a responsive player set to a 16 x 9 ratio. However, it's width was actually large than the div it is was in so it would pooch out the side. Mike shared a way to make a player responsive, but to be honest, I don't think you need to use that trick anymore. Good thing this one got finished this week.
   
2. Did some organizing to our Google Analytics and Tag Manager. It's perfect now as I went over with Mike how we had it set up, he shows me how we want to capture all pages, but with the way the application is set up, we also need to capture the History Changes. We verified this is in place and working for the Academic Commons, we also set it up for the new instance of ArchivesSpace.
   
3. Finish the week off with another Kaltura related challenge, I'm looking at integrating Kaltura into Omeka, and Will at the IU Digital libraries had written an Omeka plugin for Kaltura. It's not official, but I thought I would give it a try. It basically takes the Kaltura information, uiconfID, parnterID, and then based on your parameters it will play a video. Turns out its really designed with PHP 7, and the libapps server is just on 5.3. So I'm going to move my development to libtest-1, which is running PHP 7. Something positive from that challenge last week. 

Summer Academic Commons Usability...

So I wanted to at least capture what we came up with during our testing of the Academic Commons of Summer 2018.

Here are the test folks and the date and time we had them test the site.

This was the moderator script and these were the notetaker sheets.

We had three folks take the test, the only problem which I had with them is that they all were library employees. Not sure it affects the outcomes, but to me, it just seems like it must.

These were the outcomes of the testing.

Mike does not believe we can do much with these now, so we will just sit on them. If we do ever return to looking at using the Academic Commons we may return to these test results.

IE and Conditional Styles, eXist indexing...

So two challenges this week:

1. I had created an angular javascript addition to the catalog to display the gift book information of a title, so you can click on it, and then get a listing of all gift books from that donor. Well I have this in place for most of the year, and just happened to notice in IE, that it was not working, and it was placing the words "Gift of" on each title since the stylesheet declaration to not display was not working.
   
   For the longest time, I thought it was strictly a CSS issue and IE, but the more I looked into it I saw that my conditional CSS was not getting populated with anything, and just was style="$ctrl.show".
   
   So I started looking for information on CSS, angular ctrl elements, and IE. And sure enough, found that you must use ng-style instead of style, otherwise, some browsers like IE will remove invalid style attribute values (presence of {} etc makes it invalid) before even angular has a chance to render it. When you use ng-style angular will calculate the expression and add the inline style attributes to it.
   
   However, even just flipping to just ng-style, was not enough, I needed to make it ng-attr-style <span ng-attr-style="$ctrl.show"> and now it works properly in both browsers. I also rewrote what I had as a module which is better than just a component.
   
2. The other challenge has been eXist, and I could not figure out how I was not able to get any results in my eXist queries to just search for full text, and I know that there must have been something different that I was doing as it had worked before.
   
   Below is an example:
   
   http://exist.willamette.edu:8080/exist/apps/METSALTO/api/SearchQuery.xquery?q=all^Editorial^phrase&collection=studentpubs&type=search
   
   and this returns a json string of matches, but for some reason, it would work any other collection but the one I had been working on in studentpubs. I think it came down to who I was logged in when I ran the full-text indexing query. Ran as administrator I would never get results, re-ran as myself and I get results just fine now.

I'm just glad I did not have to ponder these issues over the weekend.

ArchivesSpace Proxy...

This task should have been easier than it was. So I needed to proxy archivesspace similar to how proxy Kaltura and Omeka from libmedia.

Usual apache proxy, but on archivesspace, there are some config settings in the ruby application that need to be set.

AppConfig[:frontend_url] = "http://libtest-1.willamette.edu:8080/archives/asadmintest"

AppConfig[:public_url] = "http://libtest-1.willamette.edu:8081/archives/astest"

So for them, the staff side is the frontend URL. Once I had these set up I then set the proxy pass on libmedia:

ProxyPass /archives/asadmin http://archivesspace.willamette.edu:8080/archives/asadmin
ProxyPassReverse /archives/asadmin http://archivesspace.willamette.edu:8080/archives/asadmin

ProxyPass /archives/as http://archivesspace.willamette.edu:8081/archives/as
ProxyPassReverse /archives/as http://archivesspace.willamette.edu:8081/archives/as

Thought that would be it, but there was still a link on the main page of the interface displaying archivesspace.willamette.edu

So I added this to the config.rb file:

AppConfig[:frontend_proxy_url] = 'https://libmedia.willamette.edu/archives/asadmin'
AppConfig[:public_proxy_url] = 'https://libmedia.willamette.edu/archives/as'

Now my front page link is properly pointing at the proxied address.

Chrysalis, Chat Widget

I worked on a couple of systems projects over the last two weeks.

1. The Chrysalis
2. New Primo Chat widget
   
   This one I had been wanting to get in place for a long time. This last year since we moved to the new Primo Interface we were just using a link in the interface to our chat page, and it was not really a widget. On last Friday someone was nice enough to alert the ExLibris community that NYU libraries had posted code to GitHub that used the libraryh3lp service.
   
   I was able to install with npm, then I grabbed the code and integrated is as custom addition to our Primo Explore environment. The chat widget came out well, I imagine we will tweak colors and location as the summer goes on.
   
   

Usability Tests, Card Sorting, and Databases

Pretty busy week, even though finals are wrapping up next week at Willamette. So we finished the month of April with a week-long sprint for me on Usability Testing. Sara volunteered WU for working with the Digital Objects in Primo with the Alliance and that ended up being the same week that we were going to do the Usability Testing for the new Academic Commons.

Usability Testing Takeaways:

1. We need to offer more than a $10 gift card if we want to get folks time for 20 to 30 minutes
2. Fewer tasks in a session are better than more.
3. Take the best notes you can, but having it videotaped would be so much easier. We have the technology lets use it.
4. I hope we can actually test the main website, but I have a feeling we are going to have to wait until the end of the summer.

Card Sorting:

1. Do not have a card sorting task with 66 cards in it, that's a bit of an overkill.
2. The Optimalsort from the Alliance which came from Optimal Workshops is pretty slick, I have now signed up for a free account and we may use it for our next testing.

Databases:

1. I finished going through all of our database entries so we were up to date with regards to whether or not the vendor had flipped to SSL. It was also just a good cleanup project, as a number of databases were not functioning. Then each time you might flip the URL to SSL you also had to update EZproxy configuration.

Google Feed Burner, SSL certs, and Google Analytics

I believe all three of these would qualify as systems related tasks for the first part of April.

1. So RSS feeds with ExLibris have always been a challenge, be it getting the proper link, or elements we want to be included in the RSS feed. So about a month ago, Blake Galbreath at Washington State University posted a question on one of our Alliance Slack channels to see if anyone has had luck getting an RSS feed from Alma work in LibGuides. I decided to try it, as I know we would have done it if it worked, and sure enough, it did not and gave a 200 error message, when you use their tool to verify the RSS feed it does not validate.
   
   When I search the Primo listservs I noticed someone else somewhere in the midwest was bumping into the same problem. I then wondered if I took the feed and pumped it through another feed tool, like say Google FeedBurner could I then get a validated RSS feed. Boohyah, got it working and wrote it up in Confluence, and Blake and I also shared at the systems call on 4/11/17.
   
2. SSL certificates, well nothing ever goes easy for me with SSL certs, but I think it's getting easier. Working on the Kaltura server, which eventually I should be able to get to Lets Encrypt, which was a pain right now, as they removed an easy way to install on sites that were already SSL. I decided to just place a new CSR request, and have Case submit to InCommon. Got the certs back, and I decided to first just copy the new certs into the same spots on the server with the old names of the files. However, even when I did that when I would check the SSL cert it was still showing the old date even on a reboot of the system. So Mike suggested it could be just as simple as the filenames still being the same. So this second time, I copied in the new certificates with their new names, updated kaltura ssl config to point to the new certs, and sure enough that fixed it. Nice.
   
3. The final highlight at the start of the week, Archives needed some usage numbers on PNAA EADs, so I turned the Google Analytics which I have set up, and sure enough, I think we got some solid usage numbers. Then I even was able to show one of the archives assistants how to use Google Analytics to even get more details on where are actual use is coming from.