Expertise@Penn was a faculty and researcher profiling system. It was Penn's implementation of Symplectic Elements. I joined the Expertise@Penn Implementation Team in December 2015. I became the official recorder of weekly team meeting minutes.
Shortly after getting to my fellow members who represent different aspects of Penn Libraries, including liaison librarians, library administrators, and developers, I became the leader of the Documentation Team to address the concern that documentation was scattered across various systems and hard to keep track of. During Spring 2016, I completed an inventory of all past and current project documentation, which helped the Documentation Team create the Documentation Location Framework. The Documentation Location Framework was used as a decision tree for document creators to figure out where to place documents based its contents. Some documents needed to be public. Others had varying degrees of permissions. This framework helped streamline documentation placement and location and was critical for a project involving a variety stakeholders and large quantities of documentation.
One of the systems Expertise@Penn uses to keep track of progress is JIRA, a project management tool. I worked with the Project Manager to teach new team members and liaisons on how to use JIRA including searching for, creating, updating, and resolving tickets. Liaison librarians, administrators, developers, and campus partners also communicated in different ways, so discussing uniform ways to respond to tickets had also proven to be helpful to keep everyone on target for implementation.
As I had created Expertise@Penn help guides for librarians, campus partners, and users and regularly took feedback to keep these documents up to date. I led two groups that provided me with this feedback: Expertise@Penn Learning Group and Expertise@Penn Troubleshooting for Liaisons Forum. The Expertise@Penn Learning Group met on a regular basis from mid Spring 2016 through mid Fall 2016. Three liaison librarians representing various disciplines actively learned about Expertise@Penn and provided me with feedback that I took back to the Expertise@Penn Implementation Team. In October 2016, the Expertise@Penn Learning Group members presented what they learned. Survey results showed that liaison librarians across Penn Libraries became more interested in Expertise@Penn due to this presentation, which led me to create additional library staff-oriented help documentation and hold additional meetings about Expertise@Penn with liaison librarians.
By December 2016, I initiated a new group called the Troubleshooting for Liaisons Forum, which meets on a monthly basis in a hybrid format. This group is comprised of select Expertise@Penn Implementation Team Members and all departmental libraries staff members that were involved in setting up profiles and search settings in Expertise@Penn for their respective communities. This group had led to increased transparency and follow through from the Expertise@Penn Implementation Team. Liaisons presented helpful tips, discuss concerns, and answer each other's questions. Feedback from this group has led to the creation of FAQs as well as the new service support model.
For much of 2017, I served as the leader of the E@P Support Team. First, I worked with IT to establish a group email address, to which users can submit questions. Then, I learned to use Footprints, a ticketing system that Penn Libraries' IT department uses to keep track of issues. IT assistants currently manually route tickets throughout the department. I was the first person to explore using the automatic routing functionality of Footprints to create an efficient escalation of issues without initial human interaction. Basically, when a user submitted a question, it generated an email to the group email address, which is turned into a ticket within Footprints. The ticket was routed to the appropriate group. This was a necessary component of helpdesk support for Expertise@Penn, because support staff for Expertise@Penn were going to be scattered across various libraries, departments, and schools across the university. As my colleagues and I collected feedback on the ticket routing system and the support model, we worked closely with IT staff and liaison librarians.
Expertise@Penn pilot roll-out was scheduled for in Spring 2018, in which select medical school faculty would have provided feedback on their experiences with the software. Unfortunately, my residency ended on November 1st, so I was unable to support the full roll-out of Expertise@Penn to the entire medical school, which is no longer planned to occur the near future.
As the Community Health & Engineering Librarian, I continued to take notes at the biweekly Implementation Team meetings and the semesterly Troubleshooting for Liaisons Forum meetings until September 2018. In my new position, I was planning to assist the School of Engineering & Applied Science and Penn Health-Tech roll out Expertise@Penn to their faculty members; however, in May 2019, the Penn Libraries disbanded the Expertise@Penn implementation plan to pursue other strategic initiatives.