Notes from 23 June 2015 meeting of the Library Technology Subcommittee
Location
Brookyn College library
Attendees
Kevin Collins (CUNY OLS)
Mark Eaton (Kingsborough)
Jo Fortun (Baruch)
Stephen Francoeur (Baruch)
Greg Gosselin (CUNY OLS)
Joan Kolarik (CUNY OLS)
Alex Berrio Matamoros (CUNY Law)
Eric Metcalf (York)
Mariana Regalado (Brookyn)
Alex Rudshteyn (Brooklyn)
Howard Spivak (Brooklyn)
Allie Verbovetskaya (CUNY OLS)
Judith Wild (Brooklyn)
Gordon Xun (City Tech)
Guest Printing
All schools have now responded. For a few schools, more than one person replied with responses that conflicted with each other. Follow up will be required to straighten these discrepancies.
We reviewed a spreadsheet showing all responses to see what kind of analyses we might get from the data provided. Of the 21 campuses that responded, 8 said they use Pharos software for print management, 5 use Paper Cut, 4 use OCS, and 1 uses Envisionware. It was noted that there might be a way that libraries that have Pharos software might be able to establish a trust network so that at student at one school with Pharos could access their printing account while visiting another school that also happened to use Pharos. This is, though, a long way from a unified printing system across CUNY. It was also noted that this report will be useful to the library system as it helps make its case for a single sign on system for various other services and tools that require unique usernames and passwords.
A draft of the report will be set up on a shared Google Doc so that we can all lend a hand in editing it. A link to that draft and to the spreadsheet with responses will go out shortly.
We agreed that the report should be about 1-2 pages and should be distributed by the end of the summer. Copies should be sent to the CUNY Committee on Academic Technology, the Council of Chief Librarians, and maybe CULIBS.
Federated Identity Management
Allie Verbovetskaya showed us a draft of the survey she’s working on that asks each library to detail what kind of username/password systems are used for various services in their library. After we helped redo some wording, we agreed that the survey was ready to go out and that we should encourage a pair or group of people at each school to do the survey as a team so that we could avoid the problems we had with multiple, conflicting responses in the guest printing survey. Allie said she’d said it out to the following CUNY libraries committees: Public Services, Systems, and Primary Contacts.
Ebooks
Eric Metcalfe from York College shared with us a report that he put together detailing some of the problems he’s been seeing with the way ebooks are acquired and cataloged. He agreed that he would share his report on the Academic Commons forum for our subcommittee so that we can engage more deeply with the concerns he has. It was also suggested that he might want to put together a panel at the next CUNY IT conference of faculty from outside the library and from in the library to delve more deeply into the issues.
News and Issues from Around CUNY Libraries
CUNY OLS recently ran a webinar about OneSearch that was very well attended. It was billed as an open forum. The next webinar will likely be themed in some way and be scheduled in the coming weeks.
Ex Libris has asked CUNY to beta test its new interface for Primo (the system that we have locally branded here in CUNY as OneSearch), which is scheduled to be released in final form to customers in 2016.
CUNY Academic Works is meeting its milestones on time and in some cases ahead of schedule. It’s expected that there will be an official launch of the service in the fall. As an example of the kind of interest this new service is generating outside of the libraries that are rolling it out, it was noted that the CUNY Research Foundation has asked recently how it can help with the project.
Next Meeting
We’ll meet in late August or early September. A Doodle poll will go out soon to determine the best date. We’re also looking for a volunteer to host the next meeting in Queens or the Bronx.
This topic was also posted in: CUNY Committee on Academic Technology - Forum.
