Data Refuge and the Role of Libraries

Society is always changing. For some, the change can seem slow and frustrating, while others may feel as though the change occurred in a blink of an eye. What is this change that I speak of? It can be anything…civil rights, autonomous cars, or national leaders. One change that no one ever seems particularly prepared for, however, is when a website link becomes broken. One day, you could click a link and get to a site and the next day you get a 404 error. Sometimes this occurs because a site was migrated to a new server and the link was not redirected. Sometimes this occurs because the owner ceased to maintain the site. And sometimes, this occurs for less benign reasons.

Information access via the Internet is an activity that many (but not all) of us do everyday, in sometimes unconscious fashion: checking the weather, reading email, receiving news alerts. We also use the Internet to make datasets and other sources of information widely available. Individuals, universities, corporations, and governments share data and information in this way. In the Obama administration, the Open Government Initiative led to the development of Project Open Data and data.gov. Federal agencies started looking at ways to make information sharing easier, especially in areas where the data are unique.

One area of unique data is in climate science. Since climate data is captured on a specific day, time, and under certain conditions, it can never be truly reproduced. It will never be January XX, 2017 again. With these constraints, climate data can be thought of as fragile. The copies that we have are the only records that we have. Much of our nation’s climate data has been captured by research groups at institutes, universities, and government labs and agencies. During the election, much of the rhetoric from Donald Trump was rooted in the belief that climate change is a hoax. Upon his election, Trump tapped Scott Pruitt, who has fought much of the EPA’s attempts to regulate pollution, to lead the EPA. This, along with other messages from the new administration, has raised alarms within the scientific community that the United States may repeat the actions of the Harper administration in Canada, which literally threw away thousands of items from federal libraries that were deemed outside scope, through a process that was criticized as not transparent.

In an effort to safeguard and preserve this data, the Penn Program of Environmental Humanities (PPEH) helped organize a collaborative project called Data Refuge. This project requires the expertise of scientists, librarians, archivists, and programmers to organize, document, and back-up data that is distributed across federal agencies’ websites. Maintaining the integrity of the data, while ensuring the re-usability of it, are paramount concerns and areas where librarians and archivists must work hand in glove with the programmers (sometimes one and the same) who are writing the code to pull, duplicate, and push content. Wired magazine recently covered one of the Data Refuge events and detailed the way that the group worked together, while much of the process is driven by individual actions.

In order to capture as much of this data as possible, the Data Refuge project relies on groups of people organizing around this topic across the country. The PPEH site details the requirements to host a successful DataRescue event and has a Toolkit to help promote and document the event. There is also a survey that you can use to nominate climate or environmental data to be part of the Data Refuge. Not in a position to organize an event? Don’t like people? You can also work on your own! An interesting observation from the work on your own page is the option to nominate any “downloadable data that is vulnerable and valuable.” This means that Internet Archive and the End of Term Harvest Team (a project to preserve government websites from the Obama administration) is interested in any data that you have reason to believe may be in jeopardy under the current administration.

A quick note about politics. Politics are messy and it can seem odd that people are organizing in this way, when administrations change every four or eight years and, when there is a party change in the presidency, it is almost a certainty that there will be major departures in policy and prioritizations from administration to administration. What is important to recognize is that our data holdings are increasingly solely digital, and therefore fragile. The positions on issues like climate, environment, civil rights, and many, many others are so diametrically opposite from the Obama to Trump offices, that we – the public – have no assurances that the data will be retained or made widely available for sharing. This administration speaks of “alternative facts” and “disagree[ing] with the facts” and this makes people charged with preserving facts wary.

Many questions about the sustainability and longevity of the project remain. Will End of Term or Data Refuge be able to/need to expand the scope of these DataRescue efforts? How much resourcing can people donate to these events? What is the role of institutions in these efforts? This is a fantastic way for libraries to build partnerships with entities across campus and across a community, but some may view the political nature of these actions as incongruous with the library mission.

I would argue that policies and political actions are not inert abstractions. There is a difference between promoting a political party and calling attention to policies that are in conflict with human rights and freedom to information. Loathe as I am to make this comparison, would anyone truly claim that burning books is protected political speech, and that opposing such burning is “playing politics?” Yet, these were the actions of a political party – in living memory – hosted at university towns across Germany. Considering the initial attempt to silence the USDA and the temporary freeze on the EPA, libraries should strongly support the efforts of PPEH, Data Refuge, End of Term, and concerned citizens across the country.

 

Online Privacy in Post-Election America

A commitment to protecting the privacy of our patrons is enshrined in the ALA Code of Ethics. While that has always been an important aspect of librarianship, it’s become even more pivotal in an information age where privacy is far more nuanced and difficult to achieve. Given the rhetoric of the election season, and statements made by our President-Elect as well as his Cabinet nominees 1, the American surveillance state has become even more disconcerting. As librarians, we have an obligation to empower our communities with the knowledge they need to secure their own personal information. This post will cover, at a high level, a few areas where librarians of various types can assist patrons.

The Tools

Given that so much information is exchanged online these days, librarians are in a unique position to educate patrons about the Internet. We spend so much time either building web services or utilizing them, it’s highly likely that a librarian knows more about the web than your average citizen. As such, we can relate some of the powerful pieces of software and services that aid in protecting one’s online presence. To name just a handful that almost everyone could benefit from knowing:

DuckDuckGo is a privacy-aware search engine which explicitly does not track individual users. While it is a for-profit endeavor earning money through ad revenue, its policies set it apart from major competitors such as Google and Bing.

TorBrowser is a web browser utilizing The Onion Router protocol which obfuscates the user’s IP address, essentially masking their online activities behind a web of redirects. The Tor network is run by volunteers and TorBrowser is open source software developed by a non-profit organization.

HTTPS is the encrypted version of HTTP, the data transfer protocol that powers the internet. HTTPS sites are less likely to have their traffic intercepted or surveilled. Tools like HTTPS Everywhere help one to find HTTPS versions of sites without too much trouble.

Two-factor authentication is available for many apps and web services. It decreases the possibility that a third-party can access your account by providing an additional layer of protection beyond your password, e.g. through a code sent to your phone.

Signal is an open source private messaging app which uses end-to-end encryption, think of it as HTTPS for your text messages. Signal is made by Open Whisper Systems which, like the Tor Foundation, is a non-profit.

These are just a few major tools in different areas, all of which are worth knowing about. Many have usability trade-offs but switching to just one or two is enough to substantially improve an individual’s privacy.

Privacy Workshops

Merely knowing about particular pieces of software is not enough to secure one’s communications. Tor perhaps says it best in their “Tips on Staying Anonymous“:

Tor is NOT all you need to browse anonymously! You may need to change some of your browsing habits to ensure your identity stays safe.

A laundry list of web browsers, extensions, and apps doesn’t do much by itself. A person’s behavior is still the largest factor in how private their information is. One can visit a secure HTTPS site but still use a password that’s trivial to crack; one can use the “incognito” or “privacy” mode of a browser but still be tracked by their IP address. Online privacy is an immensely complicated and difficult subject which requires knowledge of practices as well tools. As such, libraries can offer workshops that teach both at once. Most libraries teach skills-based workshops, whether they’re on using a citation manager or how to evaluate information sources for credibility. Adding privacy skills is a natural extension of work we already do. Workshops can fit into particular classes—whether they’re history, computer science, or ethics—or be extra-curricular. Look for sympathetic partners on campus, such as student groups or concerned faculty, to see if you can collaborate or at least find an avenue for advertising your events.

Does your library not have anyone qualified or willing to teach a privacy workshop? Consider contacting an outside expert. The Library Freedom Project immediately comes to mind as a wonderful resource offering: a privacy toolkit for librarians, an online class, “train the trainers” type events, and community-focused workshops.2 Academic librarians may also have access to local computer security experts, whether they’re computer science instructors or particularly savvy students, who would be willing to lend their expertise. My one caution would be that just because someone is a subject expert doesn’t mean they’re equipped to effectively lead a workshop, and that working with an expert to ensure an event is tailored to your community will be more successful than simply outsourcing the entire task.

Patron Data

Depending on your position at your library, this final section might either be the most or least obvious thing to be done: control access to data about your patrons. If you’re an instruction or reference librarian, I imagine workshops were the first thing on your mind. If you’re a systems librarian such as myself, you may have thought of technologies like HTTPS or considered data security measures. This section will be longer not because it’s more important, but because these are topics I think about often as they directly relate to my job responsibilities.

Patron data is tricky. I’ll be the first to admit that my library collects quite a bit of data about patrons, a rather small amount of which contains personally identifying information. Data is extremely useful both in fine-tuning our services to meet community needs as well as in demonstrating our value to stakeholders like the college administration. Still, there is good reason to review data practices and web services to see if anything can be improved. Here’s a brief list of heuristics to use:

Are your websites using HTTPS? Secure sites, especially for one’s with patron accounts that hold sensitive information, help prevent data from being intercepted by third parties. I fully realize this is actually more difficult than it appears; our previous ILS offered HTTPS but only as a paid add-on which we couldn’t afford. If a vendor is the holdup here, pester them relentlessly until progress is made. I’ve found that most vendors understand that HTTPS is important, it’s just further down in their development priorities. Making a fuss can change that.

Is personal information being unnecessarily collected? What’s “necessary” is subjective, certainly. A good measure is looking at when the last time personal information was actually used in any substantive manner. If you’re tracking the names of students who ask reference questions, have you ever actually needed them for follow-ups? Could an anonymized ID be used instead? Could names be deleted after a certain amount of time has passed? Which brings us to…

Where personal information is collected, do retention policies exist? E.g. if you’re doing website user studies that record someone’s name, likeness, or voice, do you eventually delete the files? This goes for paper files as well, which can be reviewed and then shredded if deemed unnecessary. Retention policies are beneficial in a few ways. They not only prevent old data from leaking into the wrong hands, they often help with organization and “spring cleaning” tasks. I try to review my hard drive periodically for random files I’ve been sent by faculty or students which can be cleaned out.

Can patrons be empowered with options regarding their own data? Opt-in policies regarding data retention are desirable because they allow a library to collect information that might prove valuable while also giving people the ability to limit their vulnerabilities. Catalog reading lists are the quintessential example: some patrons find these helpful as a tool to review what they’ve read, while others would prefer to obscure their checkout history. It should go without saying that these options existing without any surrounding education is rather useless. Patrons need to know what’s at stake and how to use the systems at their disposal; the setting does nothing by itself. While optional workshops typically only touch a fragment of the overall student population, perhaps in-browser tips and suggestions can be presented to prompt our users to consider about the ramifications of their account’s configuration.

Relevance Ranking

Every so often, an event will happen which foregrounds the continued relevance of our profession. The most recent American election was an unmitigated disaster in terms of information literacy 3, but it also presents an opportunity for us to redouble our efforts where they are needed. Like the terrifying revelations of Edward Snowden, we are reminded that we serve communities that are constantly at risk of oppression, surveillance, and strife. As information professionals, we should strive to take on the challenge of protecting our patrons, and much of that protection occurs online. We can choose to be paralyzed by distress when faced with the state of affairs in our country, or to be challenged to rise to the occasion.

Notes

  1. To name a few examples, incoming CIA chief Mike Pompeo supports NSA bulk data collection and President-Elect Trump has been ambiguous as to whether he supports the idea of a registry or database for Muslim Americans. ↩
  2. Library Freedom Director Alison Macrina has an excellent running Twitter thread on privacy topics which is worth consulting whether you’re an expert or novice. ↩
  3. To note but two examples, the President-Elect persistently made false statements during his campaign and “fake news” appeared as a distinct phenomenon shortly after the election. ↩

Finding the Right Words in Post-Election Libraries and Higher Ed

This year’s election result has presented a huge challenge to all of us who work in higher education and libraries. Usually, libraries, universities, and colleges do not comment on presidential election result and we refrain from talking about politics at work. But these are not usual times that we are living in.

A black female student was shoved off the sidewalk and called the ‘N’ word at Baylor University. The Ku Klux Klan is openly holding a rally. West Virginia officials publicly made a racist comment about the first lady. Steve Bannon’s prospective appointment as the chief strategist and senior counsel to the new President is being praised by white nationalist leaders and fiercely opposed by civil rights groups at the same time. Bannon is someone who calls for an ethno-state, openly calls Martin Luther King a fraud, and laments white dispossession and the deconstruction of occidental civilization. There are people drawing a swastika at a park. The ‘Whites only’ and ‘Colored’ signs were put up over water fountains in a Florida school. A Muslim student was threatened with a lighter. Asian-American women are being assaulted. Hostile acts targeting minority students are taking place on college campuses.

Libraries and educational institutions exist because we value knowledge and science. Knowledge and science do not discriminate. They grow across all different races, ethnicities, religions, nationalities, sexual identities, and disabilities. Libraries and educational institutions exist to enable and empower people to freely explore, investigate, and harness different ideas and thoughts. They support, serve, and belong to ‘all’ who seek knowledge. No matter how naive it may sound, they are essential to the betterment of human lives, and they do so by creating strength from all our differences, not likeness. This is why diversity, equity, inclusion are non-negotiable and irrevocable values in libraries and educational institutions.

How do we reconcile these values with the president-elect who openly dismissed and expressed hostility towards them? His campaign made remarks and promises that can be interpreted as nothing but the most blatant expressions of racism, sexism, intolerance, bigotry, harassment, and violence. What will we do to address the concerns of our students, staff, and faculty about their physical safety on campus due to their differences in race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, gender, and sexual identity? How do we assure them that we will continue to uphold these values and support everyone regardless of what they look like, how they identify their gender, what their faiths are, what disabilities they may have, who they love, where they come from, what languages they speak, or where they live? How?

We say it. Explicitly. Clearly. And repeatedly.

If you think that your organization is already very much pro-diversity that there is no need to confirm or reaffirm diversity, you can’t be farther from the everyday life minorities experience. Sometimes, saying isn’t much. But right now, saying it out loud can mean everything. If you support those who belong to minority groups but don’t say it out loud, how would they know it? Right now, nothing is obvious other than there is a lot of hate and violence towards minorities.

The entire week after the election, I agonized about what to say to my small team of IT people whom I supervise at work. As a manager, I felt that it was my responsibility to address the anxiety and uncertainty that some of my staff – particularly those in minority groups – would be experiencing due to the election result. I also needed to ensure that whatever dialogue takes place regarding the differences of opinions between those who were pleased and those who were distressed with the election result, those dialogues remain civil and respectful.

Crafting an appropriate message was much more challenging than I anticipated. I felt very strongly about the need to re-affirm the unwavering support and commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion particularly in relation to libraries and higher education, no matter how obvious it may seem. I also felt the need to establish (within the bounds of my limited authority) that we will continue to respect, value, and celebrate diversity in interacting with library users as well as other library and university staff members. Employees are held to the standard expectations of their institutions, such as diversity, equity, inclusion, tolerance, civil dialogue, and no harassment or violence towards minorities, even if their private opinions conflict with them. At the same time, I wanted to strike a measured tone and neither scare nor upset anyone, whichever side they were on in the election. As a manager, I have to acknowledge that everyone is entitled to their private opinions as long as they do not harm others.

I suspect that many of us – either a manager or not – want to say something similar about the election result. Not so much about who was and should have been as about what we are going to do now in the face of these public incidences of anger, hatred, harassment, violence, and bigotry directed at minority groups, which are coming out at an alarming pace because it affects all of us, not just minorities.

Finding the right words, however, is difficult. You have to carefully consider your role, audience, and the message you want to convey. The official public statement from a university president is going to take a tone vastly different from an informal private message a supervisor sends out to a few members of his or her team. A library director’s message to library patrons assuring the continued service for all groups of users with no discrimination will likely to be quite different from the one she sends to her library staff to assuage their anxiety and fear.

For such difficulty not to delay and stop us from what we have to and want to say to everyone we work with and care for, I am sharing the short message that I sent out to my team last Friday, 3 days after the election. (N.B. ‘CATS’ stands for ‘Computing and Technology Services’ and UMB refers to ‘University of Maryland, Baltimore.’) This is a customized message to address my own team. I am sharing this as a potential template for you to craft your own message. I would like to see more messages that reaffirm diversity, equity, and inclusion as non-negotiable values, explicitly state that we will not step backwards, and make a commitment to continued unwavering support for them.

Dear CATS,

This year’s close and divisive election left a certain level of anxiety and uncertainty in many of us. I am sure that we will hear from President Perman and the university leadership soon.

In the meantime, I want to remind you of something I believe to be very important. We are all here – just as we have been all along – to provide the most excellent service to our users regardless of what they look like, what their faiths are, where they come from, what languages they speak, where they live, and who they love. A library is a powerful place where people transform themselves through learning, critical thinking, and reflection. A library’s doors have been kept open to anyone who wants to freely explore the world of ideas and pursue knowledge. Libraries are here to empower people to create a better future. A library is a place for mutual education through respectful and open-minded dialogues. And, we, the library staff and faculty, make that happen. We get to make sure that people’s ethnicity, race, gender, disability, socio-economic backgrounds, political views, or religious beliefs do not become an obstacle to that pursuit. We have a truly awesome responsibility. And I don’t have to tell you how vital our role is as a CATS member in our library’s fulfilling that responsibility.

Whichever side we stood on in this election, let’s not forget to treat each other with respect and dignity. Let’s use this as an opportunity to renew our commitment to diversity, one of the UMB’s core values. Inclusive excellence is one of the themes of the UMB 2017-2021 Strategic Plan. Each and every one of us has a contribution to make because we are stronger for our differences.

We have much work ahead of us! I am out today, but expect lots of donuts Monday.

Have a great weekend,
Bohyun

 

Monday, I brought in donuts of many different kinds and told everyone they were ‘diversity donuts.’ Try it. I believe it was successful in easing some stress and tension that was palpable in my team after the election.

Photo from Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/vnysia/4598569232
Photo from Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/vnysia/4598569232

Before crafting your own message, I recommend re-reading your institution’s core values, mission and vision statements, and the most recent strategic plan. Most universities, colleges, and libraries include diversity, equity, inclusion, or something equivalent to these somewhere. Also review all public statements or internal messages that came from your institution that reaffirms diversity, equity, and inclusion. You can easily incorporate those into your own message. Make sure to clearly state your (and your institution’s) continued commitment to and unwavering support for diversity and inclusion and explicitly oppose bigotry, intolerance, harassment, and acts of violence. Encourage civil discourse and mutual respect. It is very important to reaffirm the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion ‘before’ listing any resources and help that employees or students may seek in case of harassment or assault. Without the assurance from the institution that it indeed upholds those values and will firmly stand by them, those resources and help mean little.

Below I have also listed messages, notes, and statements sent out by library directors, managers, librarians, and university presidents that reaffirm the full support for and commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. I hope to see more of these come out. If you have already received or sent out such a message, I invite you to share in the comments. If you have not, I suggest doing so as soon as possible. Send out a message if you are in a position where doing so is appropriate. Don’t forget to ask for a message addressing those values if you have not received any from your organization.

2016: The Year Open Access Broke?

It’s Open Access Week, which for scholarly communications librarians and institutional repository managers is one of the big events of the year to reflect on our work and educate others. Over the years, it has become less necessary to explain what open access is. Rather, everyone seems to have a perception of open access and an opinion about it. But those perceptions and opinions may not be based on the original tenets of the open access movement. The commercialization of open access means that it may now seem too expensive to pursue for individuals to publish open access, and too complicated for institutions to attempt without buying a product.

In some ways, the open access movement is analogous to punk music–a movement that grew out of protest and DIY sensibilities, but was quickly coopted as soon as it became financially successful. While it was never free or easy to make work open access, changes in the market recently might make it feel even more expensive and complicated. Those who want to continue to build open access repositories and promote open access need to understand where their institution fits in the larger picture, the motivations of researchers and administration, and be able to put the right solutions together to avoid serious missteps that will set back the open access movement.

Like many exciting new ideas, open access is partially a victim of its own success. Heather Morrison has kept  for the past ten years a tally of the dramatic growth of open access in an on-going series. Her post for this year’s Open Access Week is the source for the statistics in this paragraph. Open access content makes up a sizeable portion of online content, and therefore is more of a market force. BASE now includes 100 million articles. Directory of Open Access Journals, even after the stricter inclusion process, has an 11% growth in article level searching with around 500,000 items. There are well over a billion items with a Creative Commons license. These numbers are staggering, and give a picture of how overwhelming the amount of content available all told is, much less open access. But it also means that almost everyone doing academic research will have benefited from open access content. Not everyone who has used open access (or Creative Commons licensed) content will know what it is, but as it permeates more of the web it becomes more and more relevant. It also becomes much harder to manage, and dealing with that complexity requires new solutions–which may bring new areas of profit.

An example of this new type of service is 1Science, which launched a year ago. This is a service that helps libraries manage their open access collections, both in terms of understanding what is available in their subscribed collections as well as their faculty output. 1Science grew out of longer term research projects around emerging bibliometrics, started by Eric Archambault, and according to their About Us page started as a way to improve findability of open access content, and grew into a suite of tools that analyzes collections for open access content availability. The market is now there for this to be a service that libraries are interested in purchasing. Similar moves happened with alternative metrics in the last few years as well (for instance, Plum Analytics).

But the big story for commercial open access in 2016 was Elsevier. Elsevier already had a large stable of open access author-pays journals, with fees of up to $5000. That is the traditional way that large commercial publishers have participated in open access. But Elsevier has made several moves in 2016 that are changing the face of open access. They acquired SSRN in May, which built on their acquisition of Mendeley in 2013, and hints at a longer term strategy for combining a content platform and social citation network that potentially could form a new type of open access product that could be marketed to libraries. Their move into different business models for open access is also illustrated in their controversial partnership with the University of Florida. This uses an API to harvest content from ScienceDirect published by UF researchers, but will not provide access to those without subscriptions except to certain accepted manuscripts, and grew out of a recognition that UF researchers published heavily in Elsevier journals and that working directly with Elsevier would allow them to get a large dataset of their researchers’ content and funder compliance status more easily. 1 There is a lot to unpack in this partnership, but the fact that it can even take place shows that open access–particularly funder compliance for open access versions–is something about which university administration outside the library in the Office of Research Services is taking note. Such a partnership serves certain institutional needs, but it does not create an open access repository, and in most ways serves the needs of the publisher in driving content to their platform (though UF did get a mention of interlibrary loan into the process rather than just a paywall). It also removes incentives for UF faculty to publish in non-Elsevier journals, since their content in those journals will become even easier to find, and there will be no need to look elsewhere for open access grant compliance. Either way, this type of move takes the control of open access out of the hands of libraries, just as so many previous deals with commercial enterprises have done.

As I said in the beginning of this piece, more and more people already know about and benefit from open access, but all those people have different motivations. I break those into three categories, and which administrative unit I think is most likely to care about that aspect of open access:

  • Open access is about the justice of wider access to academic content or getting back at the big publishers for exploitative practices. These people aren’t going to be that interested in a commercial open access solution, except inasmuch as it allows more access for a lower cost–for instance, a hosted institutional repository that doesn’t require institutional investment in developers. This group may include librarians and individual researchers.
  • Open access is about following the rules for a grant-funded project since so many of those require open access versions of articles. Such requirements lead to an increase in author-pays open access, since publishers can command a higher fee that can be part of the grant award or subsidized by an institution. Repositories to serve these requirements and to address these needs are in progress but still murky to many. This group may include the Office of Research Services or Office of Institutional Research.
  • “Open access” is synonymous with putting articles or article citations online to create a portfolio for reputation-building purposes. This last group is going to find something like that UF/Elsevier partnership to be a great situation, since they may not be aware of how many people cannot actually read the published articles. This last group may include administrators concerned with building the institution’s reputation.

For librarians who fall into the first category but are sensitive to the needs of everyone in each category, it’s important to select the right balance of solutions to meet everyone’s needs but still maintain the integrity of the open access repository. That said, this is not easy. Meeting these variety of needs is exactly why some of these new products are entering the market, and it may seem easier to go with one of them even if it’s not exactly the right long-term solution. I see this as an important continuing challenge facing librarians who believe in open access, and have to underpin future repository and outreach strategies.

  1. Russell, Judith C.; Wise, Alicia; Dinsmore, Chelsea S.; Spears, Laura I.; Phillips, Robert V.; and Taylor, Laurie (2016) “Academic Library and Publisher Collaboration: Utilizing an Institutional Repository to Maximize the Visibility and Impact of Articles by University Authors,” Collaborative Librarianship: Vol. 8: Iss. 2, Article 4.

    Available at: http://digitalcommons.du.edu/collaborativelibrarianship/vol8/iss2/4. ↩

Making a Basic LTI (Learning Tools Intoperability) App

Learning Tools Interoperability, or LTI, is an open standard maintained by the IMS Global Learning Consortium used to build external tools or plugins for Learning Management Systems (LMS).  A common use case of an LTI is to build an application that can be accessed from within the LMS to perform searches and import resources into a course.  For example, the Wikipedia LTI application enables instructors to search Wikipedia and embed links to articles directly into their courses.  Academic libraries frequently struggle to integrate library resources in learning management systems, so LTI is an obvious standard to embrace as a potential way to make library resources more accessible.  However, when I began researching how I could begin creating an LTI app, I found it very difficult to find examples of existing app code and resources to get started.  You can’t just create any old web application and have that be ‘consumable’ by a learning management system in an LTI-compliant way.  In this post, I’ll outline some of the resources I found useful to get started building your own LTI app.

LTI General Architecture

These are the basic components of an LTI application:

  • The LTI Tool Provider (TP):  This is your application.  The tool provider is the resource the user sees when they access your application from within the learning management system.  The Wikipedia LTI app linked above is an example of a tool provider.
  • The LTI Tool Consumer (TC): This is the learning management system (e.g., Blackboard, Moodle, Canvas) from which the user accesses your tool provider application.
  • The LTI Launch:  When a user accesses your tool provider from the tool consumer, this is called “launching” the LTI application.  Parameters are passed from the tool consumer to your tool provider, including authorization parameters that ensure the user is permitted to access your application, as well as information about the user’s identity, roles within the tool consumer, and the type of request the user is sending (e.g., a “content item message” is sent to your tool to indicate the user is expecting to import a link back to the tool consumer).
  • OAuth:  LTI applications use OAuth signatures for validating messages between the Tool Consumer and the Tool provider.  LTI applications require that the Tool Consumer and the Tool Consumer have each configured a shared key and secret, which is used to build an OAuth “Access Token” to enable communication between the two systems.1

An additional tip for developing LTI apps:  Sign up for a free instructor account for the Canvas learning management system. Canvas accounts hosted on the Instructure website enable you to add a custom LTI tool to your course (once it’s hosted on a web server, of course) and also enables you to quickly experiment with some existing LTI applications (such as the Khan Academy and Merlot LTI apps) to explore possible functionality you might want to include in your application.  This way, you can see what an instructor or student would see when they interact with your tool provider through an LMS.

Building your first “Hello, World” LTI app (with some help from Harvard)

When I first started looking into LTI, I found it really difficult to find a full (but basic) LTI application to get an overall picture of how LTI apps work – there’s lots of LTI class libraries out there, but I wanted an example of how all the pieces of an LTI app fit together. After some fruitless Googling and GitHub searches, I finally stumbled upon this Harvard LTI workshop on LTI apps that really helped me understand how LTI applications work.  The repository includes a full working LTI application that you can simply “plug in” some basic values to create a fully working LTI application, complete with OAuth authentication.

First, be sure to look at the included presentation in the repository, which is a rare example of a set of presentation slides that is 100% understandable out of context, to get a general introduction to the LTI standard and what it attempts to achieve.  You’ll also want to read through the step-by-step LTI blog tutorial that will get you set up with your first “Hello,World!” LTI application, complete with valid OAuth-signed requests.2

I found it especially useful that the Harvard LTI workshop repository includes a pseudo tool consumer (which mimics how the LMS would interact with your tool) that you can use during development on localhost.  Once you follow the steps of the tutorial to build your basic “Hello, World!” single-page LTI application, you can plug the local URL of that into the tool consumer page and check out how the parameters are passed from the tool consumer to the tool provider.   You can also examine the built-in basic LTI php class library that is included, as well as the basic OAuth functionality to see how the OAuth Access Token is constructed.

Use Case:  A WorldCat Discovery API Search and Retrieval Tool for LMS

My particular use case for exploring LTI involves building a search box that would enable a faculty user to add a link to a resource from the WorldCat Discovery system.  If your library subscribed to FirstSearch or you are a WorldShare Management System (WMS) customer you now likely have access to WorldCat Discovery; but the framework I’m using to build my app would work for any Discovery layer with an API (e.g., Summon, Primo, etc.).

Searching and retrieving via LTI is straightforward.  First, using the Harvard LTI workshop LTI application, I created a /lib directory to host the WorldCat Discovery PHP library published by OCLC cloned from GitHub.  I installed the library using Composer as described in the GitHub repository readme instructions.   I created a very simple search form and response page that enables a user to enter a query and then retrieve results from the WorldCat Discovery API based on that query. Then, I set up my “tool.php” application to display the search form and POST the query to the the simple response page:

tool.php:

<?php
error_reporting(E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE);
ini_set("display_errors", 1);
require_once 'ims-blti/blti.php';
$lti = new BLTI("secret", false, false);

session_start();
header('Content-Type: text/html;charset=utf-8');
?>

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8" />
    <title>Building Tools with the Learning Tools Operability Specification</title>
  </head
  <body>
  <?php 
    if ($lti->valid) {
  ?>
    <h2>Search WorldCat Discovery</h2>
      <form action="results.php" method="post" encType="application/x-www-form-urlencoded">
        Search: <input type="text" name="query" id="query" />
         <?php
    foreach($_POST as $key => $value) {
      echo "<input type=\"hidden\" name=\"" .$key .  "\" value=\"" . $value . "\" />\n";
    }
  ?>
      <input type="submit" name="submit" value="Submit" />
      </form>
    <pre>
    </pre>
    <?php
      } else {
    ?>
      <h2>This was not a valid LTI launch</h2>
      <p>Error message: <?= $lti->message ?></p>
    <?php
      }
    ?>
    </body>
</html>

results.php:

<?php
require_once('../lib/worldcat-discovery-php/vendor/autoload.php');

   use OCLC\Auth\WSKey;
   use OCLC\Auth\AccessToken;
   use WorldCat\Discovery\Bib;

$key = 'somekey';
$secret = 'somesecret';
$options = array('services' => array('WorldCatDiscoveryAPI', 'refresh_token'));
$wskey = new WSKey($key, $secret, $options);
$accessToken = $wskey->getAccessTokenWithClientCredentials('123', '123');

$query = $_POST["query"];
$options = array(
  'useFRBRGrouping' => 'true',
  'sortBy' => 'library_plus_relevance',
  'itemsPerPage' => 25,
  );
$bib = Bib::Search($query, $accessToken, $options);

if (is_a($bib, 'WorldCat\Discovery\Error')) {
   echo $bib->getErrorCode();
   echo $bib->getErrorMessage();
} else {
    foreach ($bib->getSearchResults() as $result){
      echo '<li><a href="'. $result . '">' . $result->getName()->getValue() .' (';
      echo ($result->getDatePublished() ?  '' . $result->getDatePublished()->getValue()  : '') . ')</a></li>';
   }
}

?>

 

The application I’ve created so far is mostly a proof of concept, and I have a few essential tasks to finish the application – first, I need to re-write the URLs to point to a specific WorldCat Discovery instance (pointing to generic WorldCat.org isn’t helpful when a user is wanting to embed the resources of a specific library, to enable full-text access links and ); second, my app needs to enable the user to return these links to the LMS so that students / course participants can click on them.

For the second point, there is an LTI specification called the “content-item-message” that indicates that the type of interaction requested from the tool is the return of a link to the LMS.  The LMS must include this input parameter in the POST request to the tool.  The LMS “knows” to send this parameter when the tool is initially installed in the LMS.

<input type="hidden" name="lti_message_type" value="ContentItemSelectionRequest" />

The POST request to the tool must also indicate the return URL (e.g., the URL back to the LMS) where the link should be sent (the LMS should generate this input parameter for you; your tool just needs to identify this parameter and include it in the POST request to return the link to the LMS):

<input type="hidden" name="content_item_return_url" value="http://www.tc.com/item-return" />

The Tool provider must then render the link to be imported with some description of the content in JSON, for example:

{
  "@context" : "http://purl.imsglobal.org/ctx/lti/v1/ContentItem", 
  "@graph" : [ 
    { "@type" : "LtiLinkItem",
      "url" : "https://someinstitution.worldcat.org/oclc/709669613",
      "mediaType" : "text/html",
      "title" : "Global Warming: Hype or Hazard?"
    }
  ]
}

See the Content Item Message documentation for more details on returning JSON suitable for consumption by the LMS.

Learn, and do, more with LTI

You may find the basic LTI class script included in the Harvard LTI tutorial are insufficient for your use case – the code is a bit aged and the LTI specification has moved on.

A more robust LTI tool provider PHP library than the basic one included in the Harvard tutorial has been made available by IMS Global on GitHub.  You can also find a more complex complete sample app called “Rating” that is a great example of more complex kinds of interactions with an LTI app, including how you might build a server-side data store and recall that data through the LTI app, and how you might handle the assignment of grades or scores through an LTI app.

To learn more, the Canvas Learning Management system has an excellent open course on LTI development that you can enroll yourself in with a free Canvas account.  Once enrolled in the course, you can launch your own locally developed LTI app within the course to check how parameters and data are exchanged between the LMS and the tool.

  1.  See this post on LTI and OAuth for a straightforward discussion of the general implications of OAuth for LTI application development. ↩
  2. I skipped the steps for installing Vagrant and VirtualBox and the tutorial still worked great for me on my MAMP server, so if you’re concerned about installing those and already have a local development server installed (or you’re just working from a LAMP server online) the tutorial will still work for you. ↩

Thoughts from NDLC16

I recently had the pleasure of going to, and presenting at, the National Diversity in Libraries Conference (NDLC) at UCLA. NDLC is an irregular conference that last occurred in 2010. This year’s organizers had hoped to have around 250 registrants and they greatly exceeded those numbers. As a result, there were multiple session, with as many as seven concurrent sessions in a single time slot. I recommend perusing the program for a sense of the conference and full descriptions of sessions and posters. Moreover, there was a lively Twitter stream capturing sessions and continuing conversations at #NDLC16. As I could not attend all of the sessions, I will highlight some key concepts in this post that I think are ideal to carry forward in the work that we do in libraries, supporting people and systems.

Equity (and access, inclusion, and diversity)

Yes, the conference is about “diversity in libraries” but what became apparent throughout many sessions, is that we know we have “diversity.” Not a lot; shockingly little by some measures, but there is diversity. Diversity of life experience, sexual orientation, gender expression, ability status, and racial/ethnic identity (this last one is often very visible and very, very poorly represented). If our goals are to increase diversity, that is great. But if we try to do that work without acknowledging that it takes equity and inclusion to actually make an impact, it is a waste of time.

Equity and inclusion are difficult to achieve when the greater system that we work within has been constructed upon bias and privilege. This is true whether the system is our national government, our institution, or the individual library where we work. You cannot talk about human interactions in a vacuum, and many of the sessions reflected this with themes like “Academic libraries and social justice on campus” and “Cultural aspects and perspectives in health sciences library services.”

Dismantling Structures

An important point is in recognizing the oppressive structures that we operate within and then determining the best course of action to dismantle those and in so doing, remove or reduce the barriers to participation. The difficulty in this lies in the many, many ways that those structures disenfranchise communities. It can be through omission: not collecting in areas that represent the totality of American society, for example. Do collections and archives reflect the communities present? The Native American, Latinx, Asian-American, African-American experience? What of the LGBTQA community?

Or it can be through our actual information seeking systems: subjective subject headings, that belie the dominant narrative. Words are there to describe items, but they are “othering,” (set in contrast to or aside to a presumed norm, e.g. Wikipedia editors’ one-time attempt to separate American novelists based on gender[1]) or strip away intersectionality; or perhaps use euphemisms for uncomfortable truths, such as framing the detention and imprisonment of Japanese-Americans during WWII as relocation camp/assembly center/ temporary detention center, rather than: internment camp/incarceration camp/American concentration camp[2]. (Incidentally, the LCSH for this event is: Japanese American — Evacuation and relocation, 1942-1945, which seems pretty euphemistic to me. What were they being evacuated from? Their safe homes, schools, and jobs?)

Or perhaps it is in our technology: How common practice is it to evaluate databases for screen reader accessibility as part of the selection process? We work with profile systems like PeopleSoft, which limit ability to gender identify. How do animations and lots of visual content on the website affect individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD)?

And what about our programming? Are makerspaces implicitly gendering activities in the promotional materials, e.g. using pinks and purples for sewing workshops and blues and black for Arduino workshops? What is really being said when a supervisor asks if there should be an “All Lives Matter” book display to “balance” the “Black Lives Matter” display?

These are complex issues because humans are complex animals. We form identities, often based on how others perceive us. How are the intersections of various facets of identity treated by society? By our organization? By our collections? By our metadata? To strive for a society wherein these oppressive structures are acknowledged, the history that put them in place is a known history, and that all members feel equal and respected is a herculean task. But it is one that we are fortunate enough to be engaged with by virtue of our profession, because we ascribe to ALA’s Core Values of Librarianship, or create things like the ACRL Diversity Standards, or align with the Digital Library Federation’s mission statement.

Start Local

One way to be an active participant in working towards a better future is to assess your local environment. Much of the programming at NDLC concerned recruitment and retention of diverse individuals in our profession. Panel discussions about LIS diversity initiatives and diversity fellow programs and presentations on strategic planning for diversity and inclusion and cultural competencies highlight the serious representation issues in our profession. According to the ALA demographic study of 2014, 87.1% of membership identified as white[3]. The 2015 census data from the United States reports the population as 61.6% white (non-Hispanic, not multi-racial)[4]. For a profession built so firmly on the notion of service and community engagement, this is problematic. Happily, many of the presentations at NDLC made their materials available, so we may learn from each other’s experiences[5].

Representative hiring and active retention are only a portion of what can be done locally to bring about positive change. Collection practices, metadata creation, digital project investment, special collections development, and community outreach and programming are the bread and butter of library activities; whether a public, school, or academic library. It is important that we examine our current processes, not with a “how is this diverse?” perspective, but with a “how is this anti-racist/anti-oppression?” This is an important, yet perhaps subtle, difference. Working towards an anti-oppression mentality means that there is recognition of systemic inequalities woven through the fabric of our society, which may require changing some of the core practices of librarians in order to move the needle.

An example of this could be in the way that an academic library engages with, say, a community of students who inhabit both an ethnic minority identity and are first-generation students. This library may have done a great job at collecting a diverse range of materials, that represent this population well, but if the library does not devote effort in the outreach and programming to this group, it is unlikely that the students will go into the library to discover these works themselves. Why? It’s not that they are lazy, or entitled, or willfully ignorant (as I have witnessed librarians opine).

Libraries are still intimidating places for many students, regardless of identity. Compound that generalized anxiety with first-generation student status and an ethnic minority and it should be clear that the onus is on the librarians to dismantle those barriers – be they perceived or real – and communicate that the library is the students’ library – is our library – is everyone’s library. If this sounds obvious to you (“of course the library is everyone’s library!”), then I fear that you may not have a realistic understanding of the varied and complex lived experiences of people living in America. If this sounds like a challenge worthy of time, effort, and resources, then YAY! And I really hope that you are in a position to take up that challenge.

I’m Tired Now

Another strong takeaway from NDLC is that this work is WORK. Really hard, exhausting work. Work that often falls on the shoulders of those most disenfranchised, and that requires pushing back against a bureaucratic and social machine that has been running for centuries. Writing this blog post took forever, as I have tried to find words that don’t require previous knowledge of “social justice jargon” and that – hopefully – anyone reading can find something to relate to. See, working towards an equitable and inclusive society doesn’t fall to those who lack access to societal privilege. Sure, those individuals will feel the imperative to change in their day to day experiences, but major heavy lifting must also come from those who implicitly – and often unconsciously – benefit from the constructs of the biased system.

Lasting change that doesn’t come from a burn-it-down-and-start-again revolution requires the positive participation of the most privileged. That is a lot of strength and honesty to ask of someone – to recognize that they have – in some ways – benefited from a system, and that benefit has been predicated on someone else’s oppression…that’s a heavy realization. It means recognizing that bringing equity to a system like this will most likely require some loss of benefits to the privileged group.

For example, it is possible that a collection focusing on female religious figures may purchase fewer books on Joan of Arc in order to represent Rabia Basri and Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār. That doesn’t diminish Joan of Arc’s impact on the collection, it just provides a wider lens to view the topic. Yet, some may feel a decline of Joan’s status, and that can be frightening if they’ve built an identity around that status.

This collection example is actually a decent representation of what it means to try to put some of these equity ideals into practice. Recognizing a representation imbalance and then taking action to address it may result in feelings of discomfort or fear for some, but for others it can give voice and visibility. We are lucky to be in a profession where we, as individuals/organizations/systems, can effect change and have such a positive impact on our communities, but we must be willing to recognize uncomfortable truths and believe that a just and equitable society is a future worth working for.

NDLC Again?

Rumor has it that there will be another NDLC in 2020. It was an exhilarating conference and one that I sincerely hope leaders in our profession come to and participate with, en masse. If you are looking to get more of a feel for the entire conference, several Storify’s were created: See http://ndlc.info/ for some, as well as Amelia Gibson’s on the BLM Town Hall, ARL’s, and mine.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/opinion/sunday/wikipedias-sexism-toward-female-novelists.html?_r=0

[2] http://www.discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2008/4/24/enduring-communities/

[3]http://www.ala.org/research/sites/ala.org.research/files/content/initiatives/membershipsurveys/September2014ALADemographics.pdf

[4] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045215/00

[5] Coming soon to http://ndlc.info/ or look through #NDLC16

A High-Level Look at an ILS Migration

My library recently performed that most miraculous of feats—a full transition from one integrated library system to another, specifically Innovative’s Millennium to the open source Koha (supported by ByWater Solutions). We were prompted to migrate by Millennium’s approaching end-of-life and a desire to move to a more open system where we feel in greater control of our data. I’m sure many librarians have been through ILS migrations, and plenty has been written about them, but as this was my first I wanted to reflect upon the process. If you’re considering changing your ILS, or if you work in another area of librarianship & wonder how a migration looks from the systems end, I hope this post holds some value for you.

Challenges

No migration is without its problems. For starters, certain pieces of data in our old ILS weren’t accessible in any meaningful format. While Millennium has a robust “Create Lists” feature for querying & exporting different types of records (patron, bibliographic, vendor, etc.), it does not expose certain types of information. We couldn’t find a way to export detailed fines information, only a lump sum for each patron. To help with this post-migration, we saved an email listing of all itemized fines that we can refer to later. The email is saved as a shared Google Doc which allows circulation staff to comment on it as fines are resolved.

We also discovered that patron checkout history couldn’t be exported in bulk. While each patron can opt-in to a reading history & view it in the catalog, there’s no way for an administrator to download everyone’s history at once. As a solution, we kept our self-hosted Millennium instance running & can login to patrons’ accounts to retrieve their reading history upon request. Luckily, this feature wasn’t heavily used, so access to it hasn’t come up many times. We plan to keep our old, self-hosted ILS running for a year and then re-evaluate whether it’s prudent to shut it down, losing the data.

While some types of data simply couldn’t be exported, many more couldn’t emigrate in their exact same form. An ILS is a complicated piece of software, with many interdependent parts, and no two are going to represent concepts in the exact same way. To provide a concrete example: Millennium’s loan rules are based upon patron type & the item’s location, so a rule definition might resemble

  • a FACULTY patron can keep items from the MAIN SHELVES for four weeks & renew them once
  • a STUDENT patron can keep items from the MAIN SHELVES for two weeks & renew them two times

Koha, however, uses patron category & item type to determine loan rules, eschewing location as the pivotal attribute of an item. Neither implementation is wrong in any way; they both make sense, but are suited to slightly different situations. This difference necessitated completely reevaluating our item types, which didn’t previously affect loan rules. We had many, many item types because they were meant to represent the different media in our collection, not act as a hook for particular ILS functionality. Under the new system, our Associate Director of Libraries put copious work into reconfiguring & simplifying our types such that they would be compatible with our loan rules. This was a time-consuming process & it’s just one example of how a straightforward migration from one system to the next was impossible.

While some data couldn’t be exported, and others needed extensive rethinking in the new ILS, there was also information that could only be migrated after much massaging. Our patron records were a good example: under Millennium, users logged in on an insecure HTTP page with their barcode & last name. Yikes. I know, I felt terrible about it, but integration with our campus authentication & upgrading to HTTPS were both additional costs that we couldn’t afford. Now, under Koha, we can use the campus CAS (a central authentication system) & HTTPS (yay!), but wait…we don’t have the usernames for any of our patrons. So I spent a while writing Python scripts to parse our patron data, attempting to extract usernames from institutional email addresses. A system administrator also helped use unique identifying information (like phone number) to find potential patron matches in another campus database.

A more amusing example of weird Millennium data was active holds, which are stored in a single field on item records & looks like this:

P#=12312312,H#=1331,I#=999909,NNB=12/12/2016,DP=09/01/2016

Can you tell what’s going on here? With a little poking around in the system, it became apparent that letters like “NNB” stood for “date not needed by” & that other fields were identifiers connecting to patron & item records. So, once again, I wrote scripts to extract meaningful details from this silly format.

I won’t lie, the data munging was some of the most enjoyable work of the migration. Maybe I’m weird, but it was both challenging & interesting as we were suddenly forced to dive deeper into our old system and understand more of its hideous internal organs, just as we were leaving it behind. The problem-solving & sleuthing were fun & distracted me from some of the more frustrating challenges detailed above.

Finally, while we had a migration server where we tested our data & staff played around for almost a month’s time, when it came to the final leap things didn’t quite work as expected. The CAS integration, which I had so anticipated, didn’t work immediately. We started bumping into errors we hadn’t seen on the migration server. Much of this is inevitable; it’s simply unrealistic to create a perfect replica of our live catalog. We cannot, for instance, host the migration server on the exact same domain, and while that seems like a trivial difference it does affect a few things. Luckily, we had few summer classes so there was time to suffer a few setbacks & now that our fall semester is about to begin, we’re in great shape.

Difference & Repetition

Koha is primarily used by public libraries, and as such we’ve run into a few areas where common academic library functions aren’t implemented in a familiar way or are unavailable. Often, it’s that our perspective is so heavily rooted in Millennium that we need to think differently to achieve the same effect in Koha. But sometimes it’s clear that what’s a concern to us isn’t to other libraries.

For instance, bib records for serials with large numbers of issues is an ongoing struggle for us. We have many print periodicals where we have extensive holdings, including bound editions of past issues. The holdings display in the catalog is more oriented towards recent periodicals & displaying whether the latest few issues have arrived yet. That’s fine for materials like newspapers or popular magazines with few back issues, and I’ve seen a few public libraries using Koha that have minimalistic periodical records intended only to point the patron to a certain shelf. However, we have complex holdings like “issues 1 through 10 are bound together, issue 11 is missing, issues 12 through 18 are held in a separate location…” Parsing the catalog record to determine if we have a certain issue, and where it might be, is quite challenging.

Another example of the public versus academic functions: there’s no “recall” feature per se in Koha, wherein a faculty member could retrieve an item they want to place on course reserve from a student. Instead, we have tried to simulate this feature with a mixture of adjustments to our loan rules & internal reports which show the status of contested items. Recall isn’t a huge feature & isn’t used all the time, it’s not something we thought to research when selecting our new ILS, but it’s a great example of a minute difference that ended up creating a headache as we adapted to a new piece of software.

Moving from Millennium to Koha also meant we were shifting from a closed source system where we had to pay additional fees for limited API access to an open source system which boasts full read access to the database via its reporting feature. Koha’s open source nature has been perhaps the biggest boon for me during our migration. It’s very simple to look at the actual server-side code generating particular pages, or pull up specific rows in database tables, to see exactly what’s happening. In a black box ILS, everything we do is based on a vague adumbration of how we think the system operates. We can provide an input & record the output, but we’re never sure about edge cases or whether strange behavior is a bug or somehow intentional.

Koha has its share of bugs, I’ve discovered, but thankfully I’m able to jump right into the source code itself to determine what’s occurring. I’ve been able to diagnose problems by looking at open bug reports on Koha’s bugzilla tracker, pondering over perl code, and applying snippets of code from the Koha wiki or git repository. I’ve already submitted two bug patches, one of which has been pulled into the project. It’s empowering to be able to trace exactly what’s happening when troubleshooting & submit one’s own solution, or just a detailed bug report, for it. Whether or not a patch is the best way to fix an issue, being able to see precisely how the system works is deeply satisfying. It also makes it much easier to me to design JavaScript hacks that smooth over issues on the client side, be it in the staff-facing administrative functions or the public catalog.

What I Would Do Differently

Set clearer expectations.

We had Millennium for more than a decade. We invested substantial resources, both monetary & temporal, in customizing it to suit our tastes & unique collections. As we began testing the new ILS, the most common feedback from staff fell along the lines “this isn’t like it was in Millennium”. I think that would have been a less common observation, or perhaps phrased more productively, if I’d made it clear that a) it’ll take time to customize our new ILS to the degree of the old one, and b) not everything will be or needs to be the same.

Most of the customization decisions were made years ago & were never revisited. We need to return to the reason why things were set up a certain way, then determine if that reason is still legitimate, and finally find a way to achieve the best possible result in the new system. Instead, it’s felt like the process was framed more as “how do we simulate our old ILS in the new one” which sets us up for disappointment & failure from the start. I think there’s a feeling that a new system should automatically be better, and it’s true that we’re gaining several new & useful features, but we’re also losing substantial Millennium-specific customization. It’s important to realize that just because everything is not optimal out of the box doesn’t mean we cannot discover even better solutions if we approach our problems in a new light.

Encourage experimentation, deny expertise.

Because I’m the Systems Librarian, staff naturally turn to me with their systems questions. Here’s a secret: I know very little about the ILS. Like them, I’m still learning, and what’s more I’m often unfamiliar with the particular quarters of the system where they spend large amounts of time. I don’t know what it’s like to check in books & process holds all day, but our circulation staff do. It’s been tough at times when staff seek my guidance & I’m far from able to help them. Instead, we all need to approach the ongoing migration as an exploration. If we’re not sure how something works, the best way is to research & test, then test again. While Koha’s manual is long & quite detailed, it cannot (& arguably should not, lest it grow to unreasonable lengths) specify every edge case that can possibly occur. The only way to know is to test & document, which we should have emphasized & encouraged more towards the start of the process.

To be fair, many staff had reasonable expectations & performed a lot of experiments. Still, I did not do a great job of facilitating either of those as a leader. That’s truly my job as Systems Librarian during this process; I’m not here merely to mold our data so it fits perfectly in the new system, I’m here to oversee the entire transition as a process that involves data, workflows, staff, and technology.

Take more time.

Initially, the ILS migration was such an enormous amount of work that it was not clear where to start. It felt as if, for a few months before our on-site training, we did little but sit around & await a whirlwind of busyness. I wish we had a better sense of the work we could have front-loaded such that we could focus efforts on other tasks later on. For example, we ended up deleting thousands of patron, item, and bibliographic records in an effort to “clean house” & not spend effort migrating data that was unneeded in the first place. We should have attacked that much earlier, and it might have obviated the need for some work. For instance, if in the course of cleaning up Millennium we delete invalid MARC records or eliminate obscure item types, those represent fewer problems encountered later in the migration process.

Finished?

As we start our fall semester, I feel accomplished. We raced through this migration, beginning the initial stages only in April for a go-live date that would occur in June. I learned a lot & appreciated the challenge but also had one horrible epiphany: I’m still relatively young, and I hope to be in librarianship for a long time, so this is likely not the last ILS migration I’ll participate in. While that very thought gives me chills, I hope the lessons I’ve taken from this one will serve me well in the future.

Getting Closer to Accessible Carousels

Carousels are a popular website feature because they allow one to fit extra information within the same footprint and provide visual interest on a page. But as you most likely know, there is wide disagreement about whether they should ever be used. Reasons include: they can be annoying, no one spends long enough on a page to ever see beyond the first item, people rarely click on them (even if they read the information) and they add bloat to pages (Michael Schofield has a very compelling set of slides on this topic). But by far the most compelling argument against them is that they are difficult if not impossible to make accessible, and accessibility issues exist for all types of users.

In reality, however, it’s not always possible to avoid carousels or other features that may be less than ideal. We all work within frameworks, both technical and political, and we need to figure out how to create the best case scenario within those frameworks. If you work in a university or college library, you may be constrained by a particular CMS you need to use, a particular set of brand requirements, and historical design choices that may be slower to go away in academia than elsewhere. This post is a description of how I made some small improvements to my library website’s carousel to increase accessibility, but I hope it can serve as a larger discussion of how we can always make small improvements within whatever frameworks we work.

What Makes an Accessible Carousel?

We’ve covered accessibility extensively on ACRL TechConnect before. Cynthia Ng wrote a three part series in 2013 on making your website accessible, and Lauren Magnuson wrote about accessibility testing LibGuides in 2015. I am not an expect by any means on web accessibility, and I encourage you to do additional research about the basics of accessibility. For this specific project I needed to understand what it is specifically about carousels that makes them particular inaccessible, and how to ameliorate that. When I was researching this specific project, I found the following resources the most helpful.

The basic issues with carousels are that they move at their own pace but in a way that may be difficult to predict, and are an inherently visual medium. For people with visual impairments the slideshow images are irrelevant unless they provide useful information, and their presence on the page causes difficulty for screen reading software. For people with motor or cognitive impairments (which covers nearly everyone at some point in their lives) a constantly shifting image may be distracting and even if the content is interesting it may not be possible to click on the image at the rate it is set to move.

You can increase accessibility of carousels by making it obvious and easy for users to stop the slideshow and view images at their own pace, make the role of the slideshow and the controls on the page obvious to screen reading software, to make it possible to control the slideshow without a mouse, and to make it still work without stylesheets. Alternative methods of accessing the content have to be available and useful.

I chose to work on the slideshow as part of a retheming of the library website to bring it up to current university branding standards and to make it responsive. The current slideshow lacked obvious controls or any instructions for screen readers, and was not possible to control without a mouse. My general plan in approaching this was to ensure that there were obvious controls to control the slideshow (and that it would pause quickly without a lot of work), have ARIA roles for screen readers, and be keyboard controllable. I had to work with the additional constraints of making this something that would work in Drupal, be responsive, and that would allow the marketing committee to post their own images without my intervention but would still require alt tags and other crucial items for accessibility.

My Approach

Because the library’s website uses Drupal, it made sense to look for a solution that was designed to work with Drupal. Many options exist, and everyone has a favorite or a more appropriate choice for a particular situation, so if you are looking for a good Drupal solution you’ll want to do your own research. I ended up choosing a Drupal module called Views Slideshow after looking at several options. It seemed to be customizable enough that I was pretty sure I could make it accessible even though it lacked some of the features out of the box. The important thing to me is that it would make it possible to give the keys to the slideshow operation to someone else. The way our slideshow traditionally worked required writing HTML into the middle of a hardcoded homepage and uploading the image to the server in a separate process. This meant that my department was a roadblock to updating the images, and required careful coordination before vacations or times away to ensure we could get the images changed. We all agreed that if the slideshow was going to stay, this process had to improve.

Why not just remove the slideshow entirely? That’s one option we definitely considered, but one important caveat I set early in the redesign process was to leave the site content and features alone and just update the look and feel of the site. Thus I wanted to leave every current piece of information that was an important part of the homepage as is, though slightly reorganized. I also didn’t want to change the size of the homepage slideshow images, since the PR committee already had a large stock of images they were using and I didn’t want them to have to redesign everything. In general, we are moving to a much more flexible and iterative process for changing website features and content, so nothing is ruled out for the future.

I won’t go into a lot of detail about the technical fixes I made, since this won’t be widely applicable. Views Slideshow uses a very standard Drupal module called Views to create a list of content. While it is a very popular module, I found it challenging to install correctly without a lot of help (I mainly used this site), since the settings are hard to figure out. In setting up the module, you are able to control things like whether alt text is required, the most basic type of accessibility feature, which allows users who cannot see images to understand their content through screen readers or other assistive technologies. Beyond that, you can set some things up in the templates for the modules. First I created a Drupal content type is called Featured Slideshow. It includes fields for title of the slide, image, and the link it should go to. The image has an alt and title field, which can be set automatically using tokens (text templates), or manually by the person entering data. The module uses jQuery Cycle to control which image is available. I then customized the templates (several PHP files) to include ARIA roles and to edit the controls to make them plain English rather than icons (I can think of downsides to this approach for sure, but at least it makes the point of them clear for many people).

ARIA role. This is frequently updated but non-essential page content. Its default ARIA live state is “off”, meaning unless the user is focused on it changes in state won’t be announced. You can change this to “polite” as well, which means a change in state will be announced at the next convenient opportunity. You would never want to use “assertive”, since that would interrupt the user for no reason.

Features I’m still working on are detailed in The Unbearable Inaccessibility of Slideshows, specifically keyboard focus order and improved performance with stylesheets unavailable. However with a few small changes I’ve improved accessibility of a feature on the site–and this technique can be applied to any feature on any site.

Making Small Improvements to Improve Accessibility.

While librarians who get the privilege of working on their own library’s website have the possibilities to guide the design choices, we are not always able to create exactly the ideal situation. Whether you are dealing with a carousel or any other feature that requires some work to improve accessibility, I would suggest the following strategy:

  • Review what the basic requirements are for making the feature work with your platform and situation. This means both technically and politically.
  • Research the approaches others have taken. You probably won’t be able to use someone else’s technique unless they are in a very similar situation, but you can at least use lessons learned.
  • Create a step by step plan to ensure you’re not missing anything, as well as a list of questions to answer as you are working through the development process.
  • Test the feature. You can use achecker or WAVE, which has a browser plugin to help you test sites in a local development environment.
  • Review errors and fix these. If you can’t fix everything, list the problems and plan for future development, or see if you can pick a new solution.
  • Test with actual users.

This may seem overwhelming, but taking it slow and only working on one feature at a time can be a good way to manage the process. And even better, you’ll improve your practices so that the next time you start a project you can do it correctly from the beginning.

 

Whither the workshop?

Academic libraries have long provided workshops that focus on research skills and tools to the community. Topics often include citation software or specific database search strategies. Increasingly, however, libraries are offering workshops on topics that some may consider untraditional or outside the natural home of the library. These topics include using R and other analysis packages, data visualization software, and GIS technology training, to name a few. Librarians are becoming trained as Data and Software Carpentry instructors in order to pull from their established lesson plans and become part of a larger instructional community. Librarians are also partnering with non-profit groups like Mozilla’s Science Lab to facilitate research and learning communities.

Traditional workshops have generally been conceived and executed by librarians in the library. Collaborating with outside groups like Software Carpentry (SWC) and Mozilla is a relatively new endeavor. As an example, certified trainers from SWC can come to campus and teach a topic from their course portfolio (e.g. using SQL, Python, R, Git). These workshops may or may not have a cost associated with them and are generally open to the campus community. From what I know, the library is typically the lead organizer of these events. This shouldn’t be terribly surprising. Librarians are often very aware of the research hurdles that faculty encounter, or what research skills aren’t being taught in the classroom to students (more on this later).

Librarians are helpers. If you have some biology knowledge, I find it useful to think of librarians as chaperone proteins, proteins that help other proteins get into their functional conformational shape. Librarians act in the same way, guiding and helping people to be more prepared to do effective research. We may not be altering their DNA, but we are helping them bend in new ways and take on different perspectives. When we see a skills gap, we think about how we can help. But workshops don’t just *spring* into being. They take a huge amount of planning and coordination. Librarians, on top of all the other things we do, pitch the idea to administration and other stakeholders on campus, coordinate the space, timing, refreshments, travel for the instructors (if they aren’t available in-house), registration, and advocate for the funding to pay for the event in order to make it free to the community. A recent listserv discussion regarding hosting SWC workshops resulted in consensus around a recommended minimum six week lead time. The workshops have all been hugely successful at the institutions responding on the list and there are even plans for future Library Carpentry events.

A colleague once said that everything that librarians do in instruction are things that the disciplinary faculty should be doing in the classroom anyway. That is, the research skills workshops, the use of a reference manager, searching databases, the data management best practices are all appropriately – and possibly more appropriately – taught in the classroom by the professor for the subject. While he is completely correct, that is most certainly not happening. We know this because faculty send their students to the library for help. They do this because they lack curricular time to cover any of these topics in depth and they lack professional development time to keep abreast of changes in certain research methods and technologies. And because these are all things that librarians should have expertise in. The beauty of our profession is that information is the coin of the realm for us, regardless of its form or subject. With minimal effort, we should be able to navigate information sources with precision and accuracy. This is one of the reasons why, time and again, the library is considered the intellectual center, the hub, or the heart of the university. Have an information need? We got you. Whether those information sources are in GitHub as code, spreadsheets as data, or databases as article surrogates, we should be able to chaperone our user through that process.

All of this is to the good, as far as I am concerned. Yet, I have a persistent niggle at the back of my mind that libraries are too often taking a passive posture. [Sidebar: I fully admit that this post is written from a place of feeling, of suspicions and anecdotes, and not from empirical data. Therefore, I am both uncomfortable writing it, yet unable to turn away from it.] My concern is that as libraries extend to take on these workshops because there is a need on campus for discipline-agnostic learning experiences, we (as a community) do so without really fomenting what the expectations and compensations of an academic library are, or should be. This is a natural extension of the “what types of positions should libraries provide/support?” question that seems to persist. How much of this response is based on the work of individuals volunteering to meet needs, stretching the work to fit into a job description or existing work loads, and ultimately putting user needs ahead of organizational health? I am not advocating that we ignore these needs; rather I am advocating that we integrate the support for these initiatives within the organization, that we systematize it, and that we own our expertise in it.

This brings me back to the idea of workshops and how we claim ownership of them. Are libraries providing these workshops only because no one else on campus is meeting the need? Or are we asserting our expertise in the domain of information/data shepherding and producing these workshops because the library is the best home for them, not a home by default? And if we are making this assertion, then have we positioned our people to be supported in the continual professional development that this demands? Have we set up mechanisms within the library and within the university for this work to be appropriately rewarded? The end result may be the same – say, providing workshops on R – but the motivation and framing of the service is important.

Information is our domain. We navigate its currents and ride its waves. It is ever changing and evolving, as we must be. And while we must be agile and nimble, we must also be institutionally supported and rewarded. I wonder if libraries can table the self-reflection and self-doubt regarding the appropriateness of our services (see everything ever written regarding libraries and data, digital humanities, digital scholarship, altmetrics, etc.) and instead advocate for the resourcing and recognition that our expertise warrants.