LTS Newsletter: June 2024

Library Technology Services, Harvard Library

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

Spring is Conference Season

As the academic year winds down, conference season is in full swing, presenting invaluable opportunities for learning and sharing within our professional community. Library Technology Services (LTS) is deeply committed to both gaining insights from our peers and contributing our own knowledge to the broader library and technology landscape. Reflecting the Harvard Library values of "Lead with Curiosity" and "Seek Collaboration," LTS staff have been actively participating in various conferences, showcasing our work, and engaging in fruitful discussions that drive innovation and excellence in library services.

Open Repositories

Stefano Cossu, Miriam Leigh, and Vitaly Zakuta represented Harvard's DRS Futures team at Open Repositories 2024 with a joint presentation entitled "Transparency and Transformation: Reimagining Harvard's Digital Repositories Service". The presentation updates the community on the DRS Futures project, as well as sharing some principles and methodologies of collaboration developed throughout the project.

IIIF Annual Conference

Chip Goines attended the 2024 IIIF (International Image Interoperability Format) Annual Conference at UCLA on June 4th. He presented on behalf of Stefano Cossu and gave a lighting talk on a new plugin for the Kakadu JPEG2000 (JP2) library that generates high throughput JP2 files which are significantly faster for image servers to render. Many peer institutions, such as the New York Public Library, Stanford, and Cambridge expressed interest in using this plugin. He also participated in the IIIF Audiovisual working group meeting in a discussion on the state of the IIIF AV spec, authentication, and interoperability between AV platforms.

Code4Lib

Dee Dee Crema, an LTS software engineer, attended this year’s Code4Lib conference where she shared an update on the recently implemented electronic theses and dissertations (ETD) pipeline. As announced earlier this year to hlcomms, this pipeline supports the automated ingest of Harvard ETDs into DASH and the DRS while also registering them in HOLLIS. Watch Dee Dee’s presentation on YouTube.

ELUNA

Corinna Baksik, Emily Kelly, Laura Morse, Allison Powers, and Amanda Schmidt joined 800 colleagues from other libraries to represent LTS at the ELUNA Conference in Minneapolis in May. This event includes 3 separate sub-meetings:, Analytics Afternoon, Developers Day+, and the Annual Meeting. Laura Morse organizes the entire conference as part of her role as the ELUNA Steering Commitee Education Coordinator. Allison Powers chaired the program committee for the new Analytics Afternoon event. In addition to attending the 3-day Annual Meeting, Allison Powers attended Analytics Afternoon, Corinna attended Developers Day+, and Amada Schmidt attended the Ex Libris Knowledge Days pre-event. Attendees received roadmaps from Ex Libris on the systems supported by LTS, including Alma, Alma-D, Primo, and Leganto. We learned more about an exciting new Ex Libris tool that allows for automation of workflows that is launching soon for development partners. Staff also attended presentations by library colleagues which highlighted projects and real life use of Ex Libris products. With 14 breakout slots, and more than 10 breakouts concurrently per slot, so much was learned! LTS staff presentations at ELUNA included:

Corinna Baksik: Primo Back Office to VE: Feature Alignment Project
Emily Kelly: ERM Troubleshooting: Who Owns the Problem: You, Ex Libris, Someone Else?
Emily Kelly: When Good E-Resources Go Wrong in Alma-Primo: Understanding the Parser and Getting the Most Out of Ex Libris Support

AI Experimentation in LTS

As A.I. continues to advance, it is important that we understand what tasks it is well-suited to and where its boundaries are. Given that the scope of exciting and vital work at the Library outstrips our current staffing levels, LTS is exploring strategic integration of A.I. chatbot technology as a competent and willing assistant to augment our team’s capacity. In the spirit of exploration, we have recorded three initial interactions with ChatGPT-4o. The first interaction is very general and explores the assistant’s ability to field a range of requests, demonstrating strengths in interpreting and synthesizing information. On a more technical theme, the second two interactions explore the assistant’s strengths and limitations around generating software based on provided specifications:

AI demo 1, ~7 minutes: Fielding a range of requests, demonstrating strengths in interpreting and synthesizing information
AI demo 2, ~10 minutes: Generating integration tests for an existing LTS service
AI demo 3, ~7 minutes: Generating a pipeline component for generating transcripts

LTS Development Team

For the past 8 months the LTS development team has been working in two portfolio teams: the Data & Infrastructure portfolio and the Discovery portfolio, affectionately nicknamed the DANDI and DISCO portfolios, respectively. The two teams are dividing and conquering development across the LTS product and service ecosystem. To learn more about the current work happening in the portfolios, check out our June LTS All Staff meeting slides.

LTS Staff

Opening: Digital Library Data Engineer