I wanted to share my notes from the eCAUG conference, which I attended Oct 24-25.
What is the eCAUG conference? It’s the California user’s group for Ex Libris (Alma/Primo). That means that attendees come from institutions throughout California, and they’re all talking about what they’re doing within Alma and Primo. Because the UC/CSU/CCC systems all use Alma/Primo, these three consortia make up the bulk of attendees. In total there were ~120 attendees. This year it was held in the CSU Chancellor’s office in Long Beach.
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Let me know if you have any questions about my notes, or have anything to add!
I hope they’re interesting,
Josh
I attended these sessions:
Presentation from the California Community Colleges about a “Report Harmful Language” note that they’ve added to catalog records
This is the result of a DEIA working group that launched in July 2022
They added this link to all catalog records as a General Electronic Services (GES) link (so it shows up in the “links” section of all records):
I enjoyed this presentation because:
They made it clear that within the community college system (100+ institutions) there’s a lot of variation locally in capabilities, how they’ve implemented their catalog, etc… and they they’ve successfully achieved this.
I’ve never seen someone who’s put a link like this in the GES like this. I really like it, and think it might be a good idea at USC.
“You don’t scare me, Rialto!”
Rialto is an Ex Libris product which allows ordering print and electronic materials (a competitor to GOBI, which USC uses). This session was a ‘conversation’ which made heavy use of mentimeter polls, and was facilitated by the eresources librarian at [Cal State Pomona? Somewhere in the San Gabriel Valley] because she wanted to make a case to move to Rialto.
It was a discussion of pros/cons with institutions that use it and are thinking of using it.
Pros include that it’s much more integrated into Alma, so setting up invoices, accounts, running analytics on spending, etc are much easier.
Cons include that customer service is not great (there’s no single point of contact, just an Ex Libris chat help), you need to be cautious about the records you’re using (it sounds like you’re essentially relying on the CZ for everything, and need to manage OCLC records more closely).
This was more a learning opportunity for me—I’ve always just rolled my eyes when people mention Rialto, and it was interesting to hear from happy customers. Most of them were small (tiny) operations—one or no catalogers.
Creating and importing BIBFRAME data into Alma.
This was a report/demonstration based what two librarians at UCSD (maybe?) are doing to test/play with BIBFRAME records in Alma. They’re using sinopia.io (sign up! Get an account!) and ShareVDE beta (the front end of the sinopia database) to edit BIBFRAME descriptions, downloading BIBFRAME records from there and from id.loc.gov, and then they’re importing them into Alma using the API.
It was interesting to see; I hadn’t before seen that Alma treats work/instance descriptions separately, and it really does feel like this is getting closer.
I will have a look at Sinopia—I haven’t looked at it for a few years and it’s certainly evolved/improved a lot.
What are we doing with GovDocs?
I thought this session was going to be about ways of discarding/weeding GovDocs, but instead it was mostly a check-in on where everyone is with getting records for electronic govdocs.
Backstage, a vendor that used to distribute Gov Doc records, is going out of business in December, so all legal deposit libraries (of which USC is one) have been worrying about how to replace this service.
I was surprised that we are actually ahead of the game. Working with Carlos and Sandi, we’ve pretty much established a new process for getting these records into Alma, and I think we should be set to go in the next few weeks.
There was also discussion about potentially setting up a collection or something for California Gov Docs (state gov docs) but it didn’t really go anywhere. Apparently, CDL, which used to catalog a lot of these, no longer does much.
Lightening Talks (these are short 10ish minute talks)
Excel Alma Lookup tool
[someone] from UCI Law Library talked about how she uses this tool for collection overlap analysis—working with title lists from vendors and comparing how much is already in Alma in print/electronic.
This is a tool I’ve looked at before, and it was interesting to see a use-case for it.
Excel Tips for Overlap Analysis in Alma
Ellen A. from the UCI Law Library talked about how she uses pivot tables to do overlap analysis. Impressive!
Testing activation of OA collections in the CZ
UCLA library tested activating about 70 OA collections in the CZ; which included 138 million resources.
There were many with bad records (just a 245) but they remain undecided for many of them – maybe it’s worth having the added access, even if the description isn’t good.
I talked about our workday invoice integration.
I talked for about twice as much time as I should have. Whoops! Should have done more preparation/practice.
API Key management
Kun (USC, ILS) talked about managing API keys, and asked attendees about how they do it at their institution.
It sounds like he’s hoping to have a more formalized process about managing these, which is probably good.
API Keys enable other systems to communicate with Alma—GOBI, MARCEdit, Excel Alma Lookup Tool—these all use APIs to both read information in Alma and ‘write’ changes to Alma
MARCGenie to the Rescue
Minyoung and Rika presented this about the second part of the project to update ONE Archives serials holdings records
They relied heavily on work that Minyoung did with Phani last year, and on Nicolette’s knowledge and expertise.
I was really impressed with this—I kinda sorta knew the end product of what they had done, but I didn’t know anything about how they did it. The presentation was really clear and impressive—it’s great to see creative work in Tech Services, and it’s great to see students have to opportunity to contribute their skills to what we do. I know Rika was really pleased to be able to present.
The final session that I took notes on was about the resource recommender.
This is a tool in Primo which allows you to add a box at the top of search results when you want to highlight something in particular (for instance, every time someone searches for “LA Times” the first thing they see is a link to a libguide about how to get LA Times access).
I don’t believe we use this at USC; it would be complimentary to the LibKey Nomad domain messages that we’ve just instituted (see Melanee’s message from 3 weeks ago).
See an example in the UCI catalog.