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Introduction for Participants in WRLC Committees and Task Forces Updated
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Collaborating and coordinating work through WRLC committees and task forces is essential to our success as a consortium. The Library Directors Council approved updates to the WRLC’s Introduction for Participants in WRLC Committees and Task Forces at its September meeting. The Introduction outlines the general duties and expectations of WRLC Committee members and chairs. It explains our shared understanding and assists in on-boarding participants in the work of the consortium. All representatives on WRLC committees and task forces, whether a new representative or long-time committee member, are encouraged to review the Introduction each year as you begin your work together.
- Mark Jacobs
Executive Director, WRLC
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Recruiting the Next WRLC Executive Director
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The WRLC Board of Directors engaged Koya Partners to find the next leader for the WRLC. The Search Committee appointed by the Board of Directors (which included representatives from the Board, the Library Directors Council and the WRLC staff) reviewed applications received from Koya and conducted the first round of interviews in late July. The Search Committee provided their recommendations to the Board’s Executive Committee, which then interviewed candidates in mid-August and selected finalists for an in-person visit and interview with the Board of Directors in late September.
Mark Jacobs has agreed to continue to serve as Executive Director until Friday, November 4.
- Mark Jacobs
Executive Director, WRLC
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APAC Launches Alma/Primo Review
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One of our strategic initiatives for this year is to "Assess our implementation of Alma/Primo to identify successes and continuing challenges and develop future priorities." The WRLC Steering Committee has asked the Alma/Primo Advisory Committee (APAC) to coordinate this assessment with other WRLC committees that work with Alma and Primo. APAC started its work by creating an assessment tool, testing it on ourselves, and then creating a facilitation guide for other committees. The exercise will begin via email and be completed as part of each relevant committees normal meeting schedule. APAC found that using Jamboard helped to stimulate and track discussion. Each of APAC's liaisons to the other committees (CCC, RSAC, etc.) will reach out to those groups to explain the exercise and offer to lead the discussion this fall.
The exercise consists of answering three questions:
- What has worked well about the WRLC's implementation of Alma/Primo?
- What could have gone better?
- What can we do differently going forward?
When this work is complete, results will be sent back to APAC. Further synthesis of the results will be an iterative process between APAC and the other committees. A report on the results will be shared with the Steering Committee - which will make any further decisions on future action.
- Aaron Kreback (WRLC) and Don Gourley (WRLC)
On behalf of the Alma/Primo Advisory Committee
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APAC’s Idea of the Month: Add 'Search in full text' selection to the URL so that it is retained
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Ex Libris hosts the Idea Exchange to enable customers to influence the development of new features and solutions. Anyone with an Idea Exchange login can use their 25 votes to support their favorite ideas. Each month, the WRLC Alma/Primo Advisory Committee (APAC) highlights an idea and encourages you to vote for it to raise its visibility.
APAC’s October Idea of the Month recommendation seeks to improve the user experience of the 'Search in full text' toggle in Primo and make its behavior consistent with the other search options.
Since the May 2022 Release institutions can choose to display a 'Search in full text' toggle option so users have more control over how their search is conducted. There is a significant catch, though: when a user changes this setting while reviewing their search results, their selection is NOT reflected in the URL and can even be undone by refreshing the page.
So imagine: You're helping a student find resources on a particular topic, and the student emails the link to themselves for later, only to find that the results produced by that link are different from what they saw before and they don't understand why.
Or a professor saves a search to their account and opts to get weekly email alerts for new results. Those weekly emails will not reflect the professor's choice to include results from the 'full text'.
Other facet and search selections made in Primo are 'kept' for future use by modifications to the results URL so that saving a URL or setting up email alerts provides consistent results. The 'Search in full text' option needs to function this way, too.
APAC welcomes nominations for future Ideas of the Month. Anyone Library staff can highlight an idea on the WRLC Idea Exchange Basecamp or you can submit ideas to your APAC representative. And remember, anyone with an email can get an Idea Exchange account, just find the "New here? Create an account" link on the idea page. Then enter your email address to start the account creation process.
- Cindy Bowen (GT)
On behalf of the Alma/Primo Advisory Committee
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The security of the WRLC’s information technology infrastructure and the data stored there is of critical importance. The WRLC signed up for vulnerability and web application scanning by the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) as part of its effort to enhance our cybersecurity. Our most recent security vulnerability engagement with CISA has been a Remote Penetration Test (RPT) Assessment.
The Remote Penetration Test included:
- Network Penetration Test assessed open ports, protocols, and services to verify whether the WRLC network is accessible from the public domain by an unauthorized user.
- External Web Application Test evaluated web applications for potential exploitable vulnerabilities and included a combination of automated scanning and manual testing. We provided the CISA team with a list of 20 web applications, including some hosted for AU, CUA, GWU and MU, as well as sample Islandora, Omeka, Drupal, Wordpress and Coral websites.
- Phishing Assessment tested the WRLC’s email and endpoint protection infrastructure through carefully crafted phishing emails— containing a variety of malicious payloads—sent to a test user who acted as a victim of a phishing attack.
- Open-Source Information Gathering identified publicly available information about the WRLC environment that may be useful to a malicious cyber actor in preparing for an attack.
The RPT findings indicated that our cybersecurity controls are good -- no "critical" vulnerabilities were found -- but there are areas where we can improve, such as putting additional access controls on services that don't need to be public and tightening up the configuration of our endpoint protection software.
- Don Gourley
Director of Information Technology, WRLC
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Event - DCRUG Annual Meeting 2022
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Registration is now open for the DC Regional User Group (DCRUG) Annual Meeting, to be held virtually on Friday, October 7th, 2021, 9:30am - 12:15pm EST.
The schedule includes updates from the ELUNA Steering Committee and Ex Libris, followed by two Alma-focused presentations. The first, presented by WRLC's Aaron Krebeck, reviews the use of an Alma Institution Zone for off-site inventory control; the second, presented by the Acquisitions team at the University of California Santa Barbara, showcases their use of Alma Analytics to support standing order management. A comprehensive schedule with presentation summaries can be viewed here.
Please submit your registration by Wednesday, October 5th; there is no registration fee.
We look forward to seeing you there!
- Jackie Saavedra (saavedra@wrlc.org, Washington Research Library Consortium), DCRUG Co-chair
- Laura Morales (lcmorales@wm.edu, College of William & Mary), DCRUG Co-chair
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Event - Open Textbook Workshop Series
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The WRLC Textbook Affordability Working Group (TAWG) will once more begin hosting the faculty workshop series, Faculty Perspectives: Open Textbooks in the Classroom, to increase faculty awareness of high-quality open textbooks. These workshops will feature a panel discussion of faculty members from across the consortium who are already using an open textbook for their course materials. The workshops are scheduled for:
- October 13th, 2022 11:00 AM Faculty Perspectives: You've Already Done This!: Creating and Publishing OER Courseware
- November 2nd, 2022 12:00 PM Faculty Perspectives: Use Only What you Want: Adapting and Remixing OER
- November 16th, 2022 12:00 PM Faculty Perspectives: Choosing a Creative Commons License for your OER: Where to Begin?
- December 6th, 2022 12:00 PM Save the Date!
Check out our events page for more details about how to register for these events.
The WRLC is sponsoring a “faculty stipend program” in which workshop attendees can earn $200 for writing a review of a textbook in the Open Textbook Library.
Contact us at open@wrlc.org if you have any questions.
- Angelique Carson (WRLC)
On behalf of the Textbook Affordability Working Group
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Event - Upcoming Training Sessions on Metadata in the WRLC/Alma
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Are you new to the WRLC and our Alma Network Zone? Did you recently start cataloging? Or, would you benefit from a refresher on WRLC NZ policies?
Register for the upcoming Metadata in the WRLC Alma Network Zone training sessions conducted by members of the WRLC Metadata Committee.
Session 1: What you absolutely need to know
- Presented by Jackie Saavedra
- Tuesday, October 18, 2022 2pm-3pm
- Strongly recommended for everyone cataloging in the Network Zone. This session will cover WRLC NZ guidelines, use of the Metadata Basecamp, and the WRLC Service Desk.
Session 2: Alma Basics
- Presented by Jen Froetschel
- Tuesday, October 25, 2022 2pm-3pm
- This session will cover searching in Alma, including physical title, holdings, and items; differences between the IZ, NZ, and CZ; and customizing the Alma toolbar.
Session 3: Using the Metadata Editor
- Presented by Robert Bratton
- Tuesday, November 1, 2022 2pm-3pm
- This session will cover the Search External Resources process, sharing a record with the network, merging records, local fields, and normalization rules.
Session 4: Advanced Alma topics
- Presented by Matthew Bright with Jackie Saavedra
- Tuesday, November 8, 2022 2pm-3pm
- This session will introduce sets, jobs, indication rules, import profiles, Alma sandboxes, and WRLC colleagues to contact for support with Alma.
Please register in advance for any or all sessions using the registration form at https://forms.gle/gEaNH4i95ZFRN2g16 and indicate whether you would like interpreter services.
All sessions will use the same Zoom link: https://wrlc-org.zoom.us/j/86127507643
All sessions will be recorded and made available.
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Event - Shared Print Assessment Tools and Cost Calculators
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The Partnership for Shared Book Collections is excited to announce our new Best Practices Assessment Tools. The Best Practices Assessment Tools provide shared print programs an opportunity to review and reflect on their program's policies and procedures. The criteria used in these assessment tools are based on The Partnership for Shared Book Collections’ Best Practices. To-date, shared print programs are able to assess their program's policies and procedures in the following areas:
- Exiting a program
- Facsimiles
- Policy Development and Program Management
- Program Assessment
- Resource Sharing and Access
- Scarce Copies
- Shared Print Education and Awareness
You can find the new assessment tools on the Shared Print Toolkit website at https://toolkit.sharedprint.org/best-practices/best-practices-assessment-tool. Additional topics will be added as they become available.
Registration information is provided below. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar. The webinar will be recorded and all registrants will receive a link to the recording.
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Event - Digital Scholarship Fundamentals Workshops
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Sponsored by the Catholic University Libraries and the Department of Library and Information Science.
See registration information below.
Gale Digital Scholar Lab (1): Building a Dataset - Friday, October 21, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Come and explore our latest acquisition devoted to text analysis, data mining, and data visualization through a series of three workshops. Using Gale’s Primary Sources archive (or combining with your own text data), we will: (1) build a corpus, (2) clean the data, and (3) perform analyses. The first workshop will be building a corpus from the documents made available through our library subscription. We will learn how to search for documents, add them to a content set, upload our own .txt files, and combine them with the Gale content. No previous experience necessary.
Authors’ Rights & the Publishing Industry - Monday, October 24, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
As a graduate student or a faculty member seeking an academic position, tenure, or promotion, you will need to establish a scholarly presence and build your curriculum vitae. A building block in this process is publishing in quality academic journals (subscription-based or open access). This workshop will assist you in selecting the right journal, ascertaining your rights as an author, and explore the problem of predatory publishing practices and how to avoid becoming a victim. Part of Open Access Week (October 24th-30th).
Gale Digital Scholar Lab (2): Cleaning a Dataset - Friday, November 4, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
The second workshop on using the Gale Digital Scholar Lab will focus on cleaning our data. The integral ‘Clean’ tool works with unstructured text data that is generated by the OCR process and shown in Lab. We will walk through the stages of the cleaning process by tackling such problems as removing ASCII characters and document sections, normalizing whitespace, and performing text corrections and modifications as necessary. How you clean your data will impact the tools used for analysis.
Gale Digital Scholar Lab (3): Analyzing a Dataset - Friday, Nov. 11, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
The final workshop in our Gale Digital Scholar Lab series will focus on the tools for analyzing a dataset. Document clustering, Named Entity Recognition, Ngrams, parts of speech, sentiment analysis, and topic modeling, will be covered.
Registration
Register through the Events page at libraries.catholic.edu (CUA members only) or by contacting Kevin Gunn (gunn@cua.edu). Unless otherwise indicated, the instructor for each session will be Kevin Gunn, Coordinator of Digital Scholarship. All workshops will take place on Zoom, recorded, and made available on the Catholic University Libraries' YouTube Channel.
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Event - ASERL Sponsored Professional Development Activities
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