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.

Week 12: Kaltura, ArchivesSpace, and Google Studio.

Three items of systems related success this week:

1. Kaltura issues: so we are using up all the disk space on the server. I decided to try and just delete files to get enough room so if I have to remove content it is updated in the database properly.
   
   As I would expect it, I remove and make space one day with no luck, then the next day I move one of the videos over to WU's hosted server, and prep a page for it on my development server. I remember that there are some interviews also on our pages that I might have to bring over, and sure enough, the interview loads fine as well as well as the admin pages now. So well keep this as is until next week when we meet with Casey regarding disk space.
2. ArchivesSpace issues: so everyone once in a while I think the archivesspace software loses its connection to the MySQL database. I think with a lot of the content, it just relies on the SOLR indexes, but on the main repositories query when clicking on "Collections" and if you tried to do a search in a specific collection both functions failed with an error unable to connect to the database. A reboot of the software fixed the problem and restored the collections listing and search.
3. Google Studio: so last week I got to attend a great conference, it was the NWACC 2018 Instruction Technology Roundtable, NWACC is the Northwest Academic Computing Consortium. One of the best sessions was a breakout session on technology tools, and one of the top picks besides Adobe Spark that I picked up was Google Studio. I have started working on a number of different reports now, with different data sources, and it looks like might even be able to sync some of the data up with our Google Analytics, but well save that for another blog post. Here is a link to libguides usage at Willamette, with a data source being a Google Doc spreadsheet.

Week 10 - Fall 2018 (cron jobs, analytics, and archivesspace OAI)

Three items of systems related success this week:

1. Cron jobs are now running to backup the archivesspace database, using cron and the .my.cnf file this is now working reasonably well with a backup every morning at 6:30 a.m. we are going to keep just the last two created
   
2. The second thing I worked on was getting the new Finding Aids from ArchivesSpace piped into our Primo instance. So I had to delete the all of the old WUARCHIVES scope, and then harvest the new finding aids from the OAI (port 8082) of our server which for some unknown reason to me was not open. Then once WITS opened permanently for me, since I could open temporarily by editing the IP tables, I had to set up a proxy for it since ExLibris from off-campus had to do the harvesting. Which also had me create a new normalization rule similar to the CONTENTdm one with some minor modifications.
   
3. Finished off this week with some alma analytics trying to clean up some old messy records on our system and also demo something for the upcoming systems call for analytics.

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.