Matthew Reidsma

Work Notes

Updates from the GVSU Libraries’ Web Team.
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LibAnalytics migration updates

We’ve been using LibAnalytics for a few years, but Springshare has a new and improved version we decided to upgrade to this summer: LibInsight. LibInsight offers some features not found in the older tool, like automatic harvesting of COUNTER data through the SUSHI protocol (yes, that sentence is a real thing and not something out of an episode of Dr. Who), integration with LibApps, and unlimited datasets.

I’ll be taking over the technical administration of LibInsight, since I already manage all the other Springshare tools. A lot of you are using LibAnalytics to enter data, and many of you come from bookmarks you’ve saved in your browsers to specific data entry forms. All of these URLs will change when we migrate, so we’ll have to do some updating. Here are more details about the upcoming migration:

  • Tomorrow, August 11, I’ll do the first of a few manual backups of all the data sets. We shouldn’t need them, but I like to be safe.
  • Late Sunday night, early Monday morning on August 20/21, Springshare will migrate our data from LibAnalytics to LibInsight. Any data entered after 6pm on Sunday, August 20th will not migrate! So Sunday is not the time to catch up on entering summer instruction sessions or tours. Just have a drink and watch the Great British Baking Show instead.
  • Monday morning, August 21st, I will start working my way through the migrated data to see if everything we had in the old data sets is there. I will also be asking a lot of you to help me! After all, you work with these data sets and know them better than I do! (So if all the entries turn to emoji, you can let me know something went south.) Lots of other folks have done this migration with no problem, so I expect things to go smoothly.
  • Also Monday morning, August 21st, you won’t enter anything into LibAnalytics or LibInsight until I give you the go ahead! ;) I will probably cry if you do. I have a lot of stuff to work through first thing in the morning, including doing a final backup of all our LibAnalytics data, redirecting the old LibAnalytics forms to the new site, sharing out new form URLs for everyone, double-checking the data, and stopping first at Frey, then Steelcase and the CML, and then Mary I and Seidman, to check in with folks who use the forms and help them update bookmarks. If you have data to enter, please just make a note for one morning. I’ll work as quickly as I can, but we need to make sure the migration worked before we start piling the data on!
  • I wanted to migrate first thing Monday to make sure that we could get updated URLs and any tweaks to forms before classes started. This gives us a whole week!

I had also planned on migrating to 360 Link 2.0 (for the third summer in a row), but frankly, the tool just has too many problems. tl;dr: we’re not migrating to 360 Link 2.0 this year. (We have never planned on using the 360 Link 2.0 sidebar (PDF), which is an absolute mess. Our plan was to use the static pages, which, incidentally, were copied from our 360 Link 1.0 redesign. Go figure.) The accessibility issues alone are enough to shut down the migration. It has enough problems that once again I saw our only solution was to create a script that completely rewrites the entire page to give semantic, accessible HTML as well as an intuitive, flexible design. And since I already have a nicely working script that gives us everything we want, the added features of 360 Link 2.0 (basically, index-enhanced direct-linking) just doesn’t justify the amount of work it would take to get the tool up to snuff for our users. So, we’ll take a look again next year. When I asked last summer about improvements to the non-sidebar pages, I was told that since most customers use the sidebar, they weren’t planning on putting any more resources into the non-sidebar pages. We’ll see if that changes in the future. I sure hope so! (Or not. 360 Link Reset works very well.)

On Wednesday, August 23rd, we’ll be pushing the eJournal Portal 2.0 live. I wrote the other day about the Journal Finder migration and asked for feedback (and included instructions for testing). I’ve heard from a few folks, but fully 33% of the respondents are currently in Australia on sabbatical, so I’m hoping to get a few more Michigan-based folks to take a look.

As always, let me know if you have any questions!