CARLI News August 27, 2020

CARLI News August 27, 2020

Submitted by mjhuls on Thu, 08/27/2020 - 2:04pm

Current List of Active ILDS Stops

CARLI staff have posted a list of libraries currently receiving ILDS. Bookmark this file. We will continue to update the list as more libraries resume service.

Professional Development Alliance

CARLI has partnered with *seven other library consortia to create the Professional Development Alliance. The PDA is a group of library consortia dedicated to sharing our professional development opportunities with other alliance members. This cooperative initiative multiplies the number and variety of online professional development opportunities available to the member libraries of each participating consortium.

In this pilot initiative, each PDA-participating consortium will open a select number of no-cost, online professional development sessions each month to the member libraries of the other participating consortia. Sessions will cover a broad array of topics of interest to library professionals. 

PDA offerings including registration information (converted into Central Time Zone) will be added to the CARLI events calendar and will also be announced to CARLI email lists. The CARLI calendar will direct participants to the host consortium to register; events will be held using the host’s preferred delivery platform. 

This new initiative aligns closely with CARLI's stated strategic priority to "explore opportunities to collaborate with other states or academic library affiliated organizations". Additionally, the pivot to an almost exclusively online workplace has emphasized the need for expanded learning opportunities. The PDA also provides a unique opportunity to enrich our awareness of the diversity of library staff across the nation, bringing us added perspectives and increasing our understanding of contexts beyond our own. PDA events will begin in September 2020. PDA consortia staff will evaluate program effectiveness of this pilot program after an initial period. 

September's PDA Offerings:

We want to hear from you! If you have a topic you would like to see as a continuing education program, send your idea to .         

*Professional Development Alliance (PDA) participating consortia are:

Comments on Proposals to End Fines and Processing Fees Due by September 1

At their June 12, 2020 meeting, the CARLI Board of Directors considered two proposals regarding fines and fees for I-Share and asked that these proposals be put forth for public comments. 

Briefly, these proposals* are:

  • The CARLI Board of Directors shall end for all I-Share Members all fining for overdue materials by January 1, 2021, and similarly encourage non-I-Share CARLI Governing Members to end fining for overdue materials.
  • The CARLI Board of Directors shall eliminate for all I-Share Members all processing fees for overdue and lost materials by January 1, 2021, and similarly encourage non-I-Share CARLI Governing Members to eliminate all processing fees for overdue and lost materials. 

*Please note that these proposals do not recommend any alteration to the library's ability to bill for lost items and associated actions such as holding transcripts or diplomas; the proposals speak only to fining for overdue materials and processing fees for overdue and lost materials. 

In order to facilitate member dialog about these proposals, CARLI is seeking comments from all Governing Members' students, staff, and faculty. Comments will be accepted until September 1, 2020. Comments received will be reviewed and the proposals considered at the September 2020 CARLI Board of Directors meeting. 

Please read the full background and reference materials and submit your comments on the proposals. 

Comments will be moderated and will be made public, unless deemed off-topic, offensive, or inappropriate. The webform requires commenters to provide their name and institutional affiliate but this information will not be published.  

We appreciate your feedback! Please respond by September 1. Send an email to if you have any questions.

Join Us for Virtual Career Fair for Government, Library, Archives and Museums

Last year CARLI partnered with the University of Illinois iSchool to sponsor our first ever, highly successful career fair. This year the Virtual Career Fair for Government, Library, Archives and Museum (GLAM) Employers will be held virtually on October 7. Registration costs for all CARLI Governing Members will be covered by CARLI. 

Be sure to view the recorded overview of the fair, including tips on how to prepare, who to bring, and what to expect from students and the virtual environment. The presentation slides are available for viewing as well. 

Even if you don't have open positions, the career fair is a great event that allows organizations like yours to talk about your library. You also get to meet soon-to-be or just graduated students from schools around the country. This year you will meet students and alumni from top-ranked library science master's programs around the country, including: 

  • University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, School of Information Sciences
  • University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, School of Information and Library Science
  • Syracuse University, School of Information Studies
  • University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, School of Information
  • University of Texas at Austin, School of Information
  • University of Maryland, College Park, College of Information Studies
  • Indiana University at Bloomington, Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering Department of Information and Library Science
  • University of Pittsburgh, School of Computing and Information

Registration is required for this event. If you have a Handshake account, please use the registration link to save your spot today. For an introduction to GLAM, or for instructions on setting up an account, registering for the fair, and posting jobs, please visit the iSchool program page. 

Questions? Please contact Assistant Director for Employer Relations at the University of Illinois School of Information Sciences for assistance. 

CARLI Cancels All In-Person Events

Ongoing concerns about safety in the face of the pandemic have prompted us to cancel CARLI in-person events indefinitely.

This includes the in-person CARLI 40th Anniversary Celebration and Scholarship Kick-Off, scheduled for November 12, 2020 and the November 13, 2020, CARLI Annual Directors Meeting, and the CARLI Annual Meeting. 

We are unsure of when we will be able to celebrate our anniversary; however, we are planning a virtual CARLI Annual Directors Meeting and CARLI Annual Meeting in November. More details about the schedules, topics, and format are forthcoming.

Please remember to cancel hotel reservations and any other arrangements you may have made for these CARLI events.

Fall E-Resources Selection Cycle

The fall e-resources selection cycle is tentatively scheduled for October 12 to November 6. Many of our vendors are keeping prices flat this year for renewals. This will also be the first cycle in which libraries will be able to select CQ and Sage Video products.

E-Resources in Alma Recordings

If you missed the two recently presented webinars on e-resources in Alma, the recordings and slides are now available on the CARLI website:

CARLI FY21 Ebook Program Update

Governing members will have unlimited access to ebooks from Wiley, Oxford, and 18 Partner Presses until June 30, 2021. Titles may be used for course reserves. More information about interlibrary loan rights and other usage may be found on the program website.

MARC records added to Alma Network Zone

CARLI is pleased to announce that MARC records have been added to the Alma Network Zone for Wiley Online Books (publication dates: 2017+), Oxford University Press (publication dates: 2018+), and 18 of the Partner Presses available on the University Press Scholarship Online platform (publication dates: all content available). These titles will now appear in your local Primo VE instance and the "All I-Share Libraries" Primo VE Scope.

Nearly 16,000 MARC records were added for the 20 publishers that are included in this program. These collections will continue to grow throughout the year and will be periodically updated within Alma, as the MARC files are made available from the publishers.

There have been reports that titles that CARLI members should have access have not been activated. If you find a title that falls in the parameters of the program, please send a note to .

Authentication

Both vendors use IP authentication as their primary access to their online platforms. However, if you are connecting from off-campus and your IP is not associated with your institution you will need to setup authentication with the vendors.

Information about updating your EZProxy configuration files can be found on the Program website. If you are implementing OpenAthens, please send an email to  for additional information.

Purchases and Usage

CARLI will be purchasing permanent consortial access in July 2021 based upon the usage within the consortium. CARLI plans to share with each member their local usage. Members will have the opportunity to purchase titles of local interest but not purchased by CARLI using the terms of our contract. More information about this will be shared at a later date.

Recordings Available

Recordings for the July 2020 webinars for the Oxford Scholarship Online and University Press Scholarship Online platforms are now available. Both a general overview as well as the session for theological schools are available. They are on the program's web site found within the Oxford University Press & Partner Presses section under the "Recording Training Videos" heading.  

Pressbooks Discount Available to CARLI Members

CARLI Governing Members are now eligible for a 25% discount on individual PressbooksEDU networks until the end of 2020. CARLI is not brokering this offer. Members will need to arrange a contract directly with Pressbooks.

PressbooksEDU is an online software platform that can be used to create/edit/adapt open educational resources (OER). If interested, please contact directly.

This offer is available until December 31, 2020.

Monograph Vendor Contracts

CARLI is please to share with members that contracts with both GOBI Library Solutions from EBSCO and Midwest Library Service are now in place for all Governing Members to use.

These contracts provide discounts for physical monograph purchases. Please contact  if you would like the terms of the contracts. 

CARLI is not acting as an agent for the vendors. If you are interested in making book purchases from these vendors, please contact the vendors directly.

Google Scholar and Alma Primo VE

CARLI staff have put together some information on how to publish your library holdings to Google Scholar from Alma Primo VE.
 
When you have finished setting Google Scholar exports up you must notify CARLI by sending an email to . CARLI staff must notify Ex Libris to have your library's previous Google Scholar exports decommissioned. Ex Libris will process these requests on a weekly basis. 

CARLI Virtual Course: Understanding and Promoting Open Educational Resources 

CARLI is pleased to offer a 3-week synchronous and asynchronous course on open educational resources. This course will be offered in September with the live sessions on September 15, 22, and 29 from 1:00 – 2:15pm. Asynchronous materials will be shared with registrants on September 10 to prepare for the first live session.

This virtual course includes material that was first shared with the CARLI membership during the Open Textbook Network Train-the-Trainer workshops in Spring 2018, and is designed to help the novice person learning about open educational resources to apply the information from this program to build their own local programs and workshops.

Attendees should plan to attend each live session. CARLI is planning to offer this program multiple times throughout the year.

The virtual program will contain both synchronous (3 live 75 minutes Zoom sessions) and asynchronous (readings, videos, etc.) to be completed before each live session. The live sessions will include presentations, but the aim of the program planners is that these will incorporate a flipped classroom model to build community among participants as all share and discuss the topics.

For more information or to register, visit the event page.

Registration is available until September 9 or until the course is full.

If you have any questions, please send them to .

Alma Primo VE Update

We have reached another milestone in our Alma and Primo VE implementation project. Thanks again to all of you for your hard work over the last 18 months. 

As of September 1, our project will transition from what Ex Libris calls the implementation phase into the support phase. This means that we’ve completed the data migration and initial configuration process, and at least the first round of review and troubleshooting processes that follow such a massive task. Our Ex Libris project manager and team of consultants will soon move on to other assignments and the CARLI project team will transition to having monthly, rather than twice weekly, meetings with Ex Libris staff. Instead of communicating with our Ex Libris project team through the Basecamp project management tool, CARLI staff will send our questions and requests for assistance to the Ex Libris Salesforce-based support portal. 

This transition to support is probably more significant to the CARLI staff than it will be to I-Share library staff, but it does make this a good time to highlight and review some of the many ways we have available to learn and communicate about Alma and Primo VE. These products are not mastered in a few brief months; we will all continue to learn and explore them over the coming years, and it is good to have so many sources of help and information available.

So let’s briefly revisit a number of options we have for our ongoing education and communication about Alma and Primo VE.

First, I’d like to remind you that we are part of a world-wide customer community using these products. Our Voyager installation was unique in its size, software version, our heavy use of Universal Borrowing, and eventually our move to the VuFind service. Running our own software on our own servers gave us the options to do many things our own way, and on our own schedule. While we may miss some of that, we have gained a world-wide community of other libraries and consortia that are using the same version of the Alma and Primo VE on the same set of cloud servers.

CARLI has a consortial membership in ELUNA, the Ex Libris Users of North America, a non-profit organization funded through membership fees, and separate from the Ex Libris company. ELUNA works with Ex Libris to provide continuing education events, run several product-related email lists which are open to all customers, and also supports the Ex Libris product enhancement voting cycle. Individual libraries may opt to join ELUNA, however, our consortial membership allows all I-Share libraries to have access to ELUNA events at member rates and to have access to slides or recordings of ELUNA events. ELUNA typically hosts an annual in-person conference, but this year that conference, as with similar events, was held online and the recordings of that event are available.

ELUNA has also recently launched a new series of online continuing education events called ELUNA Learns. These events have a registration fee of $25 per person. ELUNA’s email lists are incredibly helpful resources. The Alma-L email list is available for subscription in full or digest format and has a searchable archive. Alma-L is a great place to ask fellow Alma customers how they approach various tasks and workflows. Similarly, the Primo list serves this function for both classic Primo and Primo VE. Remember when reading or posting to these lists that CARLI uses Primo VE, not Primo, and that our consortial setup with a Network Zone means that not every posting will apply to our configuration. For more information on how to subscribe to these lists see the ELUNA web site.

In addition, Ex Libris also offers an ongoing series of continuing education events. Most of these are announced on the various ELUNA email lists as well. Ex Libris is a ProQuest company, and the registration page for these events is a ProQuest-branded page. Most of these events are presented via Ex Libris’ WebEx. We also continue to have ongoing access to the web-based training in the Ex Libris Knowledge Center that we have been encouraging you to use. If you have not yet done so, you can still work on Alma and Primo VE product certification. Here are the links to those courses. Be sure you are referring to Primo VE materials rather than Primo whenever using the Ex Libris Knowledge Center: Alma Administration Certification and Primo VE Administration Certification Overview.

Closer to home, you probably know that CARLI runs several email lists most of which allow subscribers to post to the list. We strongly encourage I-Share library staff to use these lists as forums for conversation, where you can ask each other how other I-Share libraries are doing tasks, and as a place to share new ideas and work in progress with other I-Share colleagues. Note that the lists that have “Interest Group” in their name are intended for these open unstructured member conversations. Interest group lists are open to anyone from a CARLI library. Interest groups do not have chairs, meetings or the more formal structure of CARLI committees. These are for your use, so please make use of them.

CARLI plans to continue our every-other-Thursday Open Office Hours webinars this fall. Please see the CARLI calendar for dates and connection details. We will also be working with our CARLI committees and task forces to provide more topic-specific webinars. In addition, we want to have some more informal web-based collaboration sessions where we work together with interested library staff on specific tasks, test workflows, and document our findings. If you or a colleague has a topic that you think would lend itself to this kind of informal collaboration, please send a note to  CARLI can set up and announce a Zoom meeting for you, provide document sharing space, and share any products you create with the membership. Our consortial size and diversity is a real asset to us as we learn together, and opportunities for informal collaboration can help us all move forward with Alma and Primo VE.

Finally, a reminder about the Alma monthly software updates. The September Alma and Primo VE update will be installed on Sunday, September 6, 2020. Ex Libris posts release notes in their Knowledge Center documenting the changes and fixes coming each month. CARLI staff actively monitor these updates and while we will keep you informed of changes that we know will impact I-Share, we encourage you to review them as well.

None of us went into this implementation being able to foresee the challenges and changes to our service models that we would face with COVID-19. While it’s not possible to have in-person continuing education events, we hope that our consortial collaboration opportunities and the resources I’ve covered in this article will help you to become more aware of the many Alma and Primo VE information resources we have available to us. We can make I-Share better together.

Other Library News

Community College WiFi Grants

The Secretary of State/Illinois State Library is pleased to announce a new grant offering available to community college libraries. 

The Digital Network Access for Illinois Libraries offering provides up to $10,000 per agency in Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act funds to improve the capacity of public and school libraries and community colleges, especially in areas of high need, to provide reliable internet and therefore extend the library's digital network access.   

The application is due September 30, 2020.  All awards will be paid out based on reimbursement.  If you have questions, contact the Illinois State Library, Library Development Group at 1-800-665-5576 extension 2.

Upcoming CARLI Events and Meetings

Important Dates

The CARLI Office staff will remain in remote work status until further notice.

September 6     Alma Monthly Release
September 7     CARLI Office Closed for Labor Day
September 13    Alma Release Update

October 4         Alma Monthly Release
October 30        Last Day for Voyager

Meetings

September 2     Resource Sharing Committee
September 2     Collection Management Committee
September 3     Governing Directors Check-in
September 4     Technical Services Committee
September 9    Executive Committee
September 10    Alma & Primo VE Open Office Hours 
September 16    Instruction Committee
September 18    Board of Directors
September 22    Created Content Committee
September 24    Alma & Primo VE Open Office Hours

October 7         Resource Sharing Committee
October 8         Alma & Primo VE Open Office Hours
October 21        Instruction Committee Meeting
October 22        Alma & Primo VE Open Office Hours
October 27        Created Content Committee    

Webinars, Forums, Workshops and Training

September 3     PDA Series: Creating Patron Driven Acquisitions for Your Library
September 3     PDA Series: Best Practices for Effective Email Outreach
September 15    Understanding and Promoting Open Educational Resources Session 1
September 15    PDA Series: Introduction to Creative Commons Licensing
September 15    PDA Series: Best Practices for Marketing & Social Media
September 17    PDA Series: Cultivating a Growth Mindset
September 21    PDA Series: Chaos is A Ladder: Assessing Opportunities on the Fly
September 22    Understanding and Promoting Open Educational Resources Session 2
September 23    PDA Series: Accessibility Benefits Everyone
September 29    PDA Series: Browser and Smartphone Privacy Tips
September 29    Understanding and Promoting Open Educational Resources Session 3

October 7          iSchool Career Fair
October 14        PDA Series: Assessment of Learning
October 21        Instruction Committee
October 22        Alma & Primo VE Open Office Hours

Consult the CARLI calendar for the most current list of meeting times and locations.

Contact Us

Please direct all questions and comments about the e-newsletter to . Subscribe to CARLI email lists to receive the latest news on topics of interest to you.