LTS Newsletter: November 2024

Library Technology Services, Harvard Library

Welcome to Library Technology Service’s occasional newsletter for anyone interested in Harvard Library IT.

Annual LTS All-Staff Onsite Recap

In October, the Annual LTS All-Staff Onsite brought our primarily remote team together at 784 Memorial Drive, providing a rare and valuable chance to connect in person, deepen ties to Harvard, and collaboratively advance our work. This gathering is essential for building community within our team, strengthening connections with colleagues across the university, and enhancing our collective impact.

A highlight of the event was a presentation by Emily Bottis, Managing Director of Academic Technology, who gave a deep dive into the Learning Experience Platform (LXP). Emily’s insights prompted lively discussions about how LTS might use the tool as well as integrate and enhance library services with the LXP, opening up possibilities for innovative collaboration. Janell Simms from the Digital Accessibility Team also joined us, sharing practical insights on accessibility in our daily communications, presentations, and documents to ensure inclusivity in our work.

The Harvard Library Fall Social offered a delightful break, with cider donuts, hot chocolate, and the chance to meet and socialize with colleagues from across the library community. The LTS onsite event also featured lightning talks (see examples below), dedicated project sessions, and a guided tour of the Harvard University Native American Program (HUNAP) for a few lucky attendees.

This onsite left our team feeling inspired and aligned, ready to bring new ideas and momentum to our projects as we move forward.

Harvard Library Public Domain Corpus

The Harvard Library Public Domain Corpus, a collection of roughly 1 million public domain books digitized in a previous partnership with Google, has been made available to the Harvard Community for use, including for training large language models (LLMs).

This collection is available by request, and was prepared in a collaboration between the Harvard Library, Library Technology Services and HUIT’s Technology Partner Services team. To provide access to the Corpus, the team selected a number of tools:

Globus, to store the files and provide mediated access
Microsoft Forms, to use as a platform for researchers to request access. This was chosen over Qualtrics or Google Forms because it allows for a dynamic underlying spreadsheet with additional fields that the team can use to track request approvals.
Adobe PDF with required digital signature fields so that researchers will acknowledge compliance with the Corpus’s Terms of Use.

This collection is currently being offered as a pilot project, and Harvard Library intends to follow up with researchers to learn more about how they used the materials.

Alma Manage Patron Services User Interface Update

The Alma circulation desk design has undergone updates to optimize the Patron Services and Returns workflows, with a focus on providing a more streamlined process.

Beginning in November, users can opt-in to use the new UI in the Alma production environment. The new circulation desk UI reorganizes patron account information into customizable boxes, allowing easy access to details like active balances, payment options, and item loan/return data. Patrons' loan, return, and request information can now be easily sorted and filtered, with clear labels indicating overdue items or outstanding fines. The returns workflow has been enhanced, providing more detailed information about returned items and next steps. Users can customize the display of information across the various pages.

To enable the new Manage Patron Services UI, click on your user icon in Alma's persistent bar, select Feature Rollout Preferences, and activate the New Circulation Desk UI toggle. The new UI is tentatively scheduled to become the default option beginning in February 2025. For a webinar showing the new functionality, see The New Manage Patron Services Page Circulation Desk.

Alma screen shot

DRS Futures Update

The LIBSAFE ADVANCED implementation is underway! LIBSAFE ADVANCED from LIBNOVA has been selected to provide effective, efficient, and sustainable long-term preservation of Harvard-Library’s digital content. Key benefits include:

Enhanced self-service user experience
Accepts the widest diversity of digital materials
Supports the widest range of archival processing workflows
Integrates seamlessly with other Library and University systems

Diagram of DRS Futures project phases

Contact the DRS Futures team if you have feedback or questions.

LTS Staff Lightning Talks

As has become something of a tradition at our All-Staff Onsites, LTS staff delivered lightning talks about recent work. We invite you to review the slides from selected lightning talks and some highlights are below:

Angela Kilsdonk reported on DISCO and DANDI

Over the past few months, the two LTS development portfolio teams—Discovery (DISCO) and Data & Infrastructure (DANDI)—have been diligently working to enhance and optimize Harvard Library's digital ecosystem. Some of the highlights of our recent work include:

Enhanced our operational efficiency and scalability with continued work on a major infrastructure upgrade across all systems and services hosted by LTS.
Added support for right-to-left (RTL) layouts on CURIOSity, enabling the correct display of languages like Hebrew and Arabic for the first time.
Improved ArchivesSpace CSV downloads so that they no longer expire before completing. This provides a better user experience and has freed up both LTS Support and Ops resources.

For more information about the portfolio teams' current initiatives and future plans, we invite you to review the slides from the October LTS All Staff meeting. Open DISCO & DANDI slides.

Vitaly Zakuta and Stefano Cossu: DRS Futures Thundertalk

Harvard’s Digital Repository Service (DRS) Futures project is now in Phase III — implementing the next-generation digital preservation repository. The project has evolved from envisioning (Phase I) and planning (Phase II) to Implementation (Phase III), with LIBNOVA’s LIBSAFE system selected to replace the legacy DRS.

The DRS Futures project is progressing with critical tasks in its Implementation phase, including information modeling and metadata schema creation, designing local integrations, planning the transition of stakeholder workflows, and preparing for a full migration of digital assets from the legacy system. Migration to the new system starts in Q2 of 2025 and includes migration of content and workflows as well as training activities for our stakeholders. This collaborative project includes stakeholders from LTS, HL Digital Preservation Services, and representatives from DRS repositories. Open DRS Futures slides.

Doug Simon’s Overview of Collections Explorer

As part of the Reimagining Discovery team, Doug presented an overview of Collections Explorer. This new application allows users to search Harvard’s special collections using semantic search. Currently in its alpha phase, this web app integrates collections from platforms like Drupal and Curiosity, along with ~200 Finding Aids. Key components of the project include:

Data Transformation: Custom data transformers process metadata records and extract text, which is added to a semantic index for efficient searchability.
Semantic API: This API facilitates quick retrieval by transforming user queries into embeddings, matched with indexed documents.
LLM API: This enables AI-powered search suggestions and search result explanations, along with converting natural language queries into HOLLIS keyword searches.

For the future, the team plans to improve the application for a public release, including improvements to search precision, enhancing data transformations, and integrating a more scalable semantic database. Open the Collections Explorer slides.

Maura Meagher and JJ Chen on React and Shareable Components for Collections Explorer

Maura and JJ presented on their experiences with modernizing Harvard Library web components, as part of the Reimagining Discovery project. They discussed the team’s selection process for a frontend web framework, resulting in React.js being chosen for its reactive UI, third-party integrations, and support for API interaction.

Various tools were chosen to help the development process, including Storybook for creating modular UI components with React integration. Maura provided a live demo of Storybook, highlighting its potential to improve testing and code reviews for web development.

Looking ahead, the team plans to use Storybook to create a shared library of UI components in Storybook, that can be used across other LTS projects. Open React and Shareable Components slides.

Miriam Leigh on Project in a Box

Born out of a desire to have a centralized project intake and tracking system, LTS has modified the Project in a Box Smartsheets package offered by the HUIT Project Management Office. We have built an initial intake form with an underlying sheet to support a business analyst’s intake interview, followed by a series of sheets, reports, and dashboards that support the the full process undertaken by project managers and business analysts. There will also be an LTS-wide series of dashboards to better see the full scope of project work across the business units. Open Project in a Box slides.

Staff News

LTS welcomes Illya Moskvin as our new DRS Futures Software Engineer. He will be working on the DRS Futures project. Illya joins LTS after a recent remote position with American Family Insurance and also development work for art museums in the mid-west. Illya has a degree in Art History along with extensive experience developing in various web languages.

Library Technology Services: Staff Documentation Center