CARLI News May 27, 2020

ILDS Service Suspension 

ILDS service continues to be suspended until further notice. We are working closely with RAILS and IHLS to coordinate a smooth restart of the delivery service. Make sure to watch your email and check the ILDS information page to keep up on the latest.

CARLI 40th Anniversary Celebration

This year CARLI is celebrating 40 years of resource sharing through CARLI and its predecessor organizations. The CARLI 40th Anniversary Celebration and Scholarship Kick-Off Event, originally scheduled for June 28 at the Art Institute of Chicago, has been rescheduled to November 12, 5:30-7:30 p.m., at the I Hotel in Champaign, the day before the CARLI Annual Meeting, November 13. Save the date!

In recognition of our 40th Anniversary we invite you to share your memories.

Please share stories, photos, videos, anything! Share with us your reflections about CARLI, ILCSO, CCMP, IDAL, the staff, the meetings, consortium membership, resource sharing, etc. Ask your faculty, staff, and students to share as well. Tell us about a moment, a day, an event, person, or place that made a difference to you or the people you know. 

We look forward to hearing what CARLI means to you!

8th Annual Instruction Showcase: Register by May 28

The CARLI Instruction Committee is coordinating its 8th Annual Online Instruction Showcase on Friday, May 29, 2020. Registration closes May 28. Please share with anyone at your institution who may be interested.

The showcase features innovative elements in library instruction and assessment, where presenters demonstrate instruction techniques and tools that are designed to enhance library instruction. 

The program, focused on the theme, "Fresh Starts and Restarts: Growing Beyond Your Comfort Zone," will feature brief presentations from 9:00-11:30 a.m. and a virtual lunch hour from noon-12:30 p.m. where participants can socialize, network, and talk about instruction with their colleagues from across CARLI. Please join us! 

If you have any questions about this program, please contact the CARLI Office.

Open Textbook Network Summit – Free Registration (Closes June 1)

The Open Textbook Network holds a Summit each summer for members to learn from each other and to build community among its members. With direction from the OTN, CARLI’s consortial membership meant that attendance at the Summit was reserved for those working on our statewide programs. However, this year, the free, online Summit is open to anyone interested in attending. Sessions will be held 11-Noon and 1-2 on the days noted. 

Registration is now open for this year’s OTN Summit (#OTNSummit2020), which will be held virtually across two weeks, each Monday through Thursday between June 15-25 with 2 1-hour sessions per day. Attendees register only for the sessions in which they are interested and will attend. 
 
An important and exciting note: this year, many of the events will be open to audiences everywhere, regardless of OTN membership. This is a great opportunity to include new voices and perspectives and to share the benefits of open education with a larger community.
 
Spread the word! You are encouraged to extend the invitation to anyone in the higher education community who may be interested in open education.

Please see the OTN Summit website for more details, including a (non-finalized) schedule of programming and event descriptions. Please use this short form to register. Registration will close on June 1.

The OTN staff are very excited for two weeks of community engagement, connection, and sharing. Now more than ever, as an organization, the OTN looks forward to this opportunity to come together amid such uncertain times. 

Save the Date: CARLI Annual Meeting

The 2020 CARLI Annual Meeting will be held on Friday, November 13 at the I Hotel and Conference Center in Champaign. Staff at any CARLI member library is invited to attend. 

A meeting of the CARLI Governing Directors will precede the Annual Meeting. 

Registration is available is available from the CARLI Calendar. 

CARLI Announces Recipient of New Scholarship

CARLI is pleased to announce that Victoria Turner, Cataloging Assistant at Harper College Library in Palatine, has been selected to receive the CARLI Scholarship. CARLI is awarding this scholarship for the first time for the 2020/2021 academic year. 

"My first semester at the iSchool at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has already enriched my knowledge and furthered my enthusiasm of libraries and librarianship," Turner said. "I am both thankful and humbled by the generosity of the CARLI scholarship donors. Knowing that I have the support of the CARLI family cheering me on inspires me as I continue my studies of information organization and metadata standards and practices."

Turner was selected based on her response to a personal essay question regarding her professional goals and objectives in pursuing a library career that demonstrates a commitment to the profession and the strength of her references.

"We are thrilled to award this scholarship for the first time in our history, and so pleased to be able to help support the education of one of the dedicated staff of our CARLI libraries, " said CARLI Senior Director Anne Craig. "I am grateful to the Scholarship Fund donors who have so generously supported this important new program, helping CARLI to grow the profession. "

The CARLI Scholarship provides financial assistance to current employees of CARLI Governing Member Libraries pursuing graduate studies leading to a Master′s Degree in Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. CARLI established the scholarship in commemoration of the 40th anniversary of resource sharing by CARLI and its predecessor organizations. The scholarship is funded by donations. 

CARLI Staff Member Recipient of Peggy Harris Award

Taylor Anderson, Grad Student for CARLI Counts, is the recipient of the Illinois School of Information Science′s Peggy Harris Award. The award is given to the individual who most exemplifies the spirit of volunteerism, and a concern for others and for the welfare of the School. Congratulations Taylor!

Taylor Anderson, in her capacity as the Graduate Student Hourly Worker for the IMLS Laura Bush 21st Century Grant project, CARLI Counts, exemplifies the qualities of the Peggy Harris Award. CARLI Counts is a team-based continuing education immersion program that features teams of Illinois academic librarians who come together in person twice to learn assessment skills for the purposes of advocacy and service development. Approximately 50 CARLI (Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois) member library staff from all over the state and from many different library types are involved in each cohort. The program features outside speakers, webinars, and creating conference posters in addition to individual participants' projects. In short, hundreds of details are involved in making the program successful, ranging from reserving hotel rooms to working with many different campus units to supporting individual participants' needs. Taylor was unfailing in her dedication to ensuring that participants had the support and all information that they needed. She responded to hundreds of emails asking about logistics, timelines, and requests for special needs. Her care, kindness, good humor, and follow through were genuine and shone through in every interaction with our members. She routinely volunteered to shuttle people around, stay late, come in early, and help people get through the project in whatever way she could. Furthermore, she never got impatient or let details slip. Taylor is a fine example of the kind of student of who exemplifies true public service and care for her constituency.

Alma Primo VE Update

We′ve reached another milestone in our move to Alma and Primo VE—as I write this on May 22, we are on the last day that library and CARLI staff have access to the Alma and Primo VE test environments that we have had since last fall. CARLI has exported copies of all the Voyager data and provided it to Ex Libris whose staff will now start work on rebuilding our test environments using our updated migration forms and our current data. While that work is ongoing over the next 3–4 weeks, any Alma or Primo VE testing or training will need to be done using our five sandboxes. The May 21, CARLI Open Office hours included a review of how to connect to the sandboxes and best practices for their use. Remember that the sandboxes are generic data provided by Ex Libris and not I-Share library data, and as they are available to all I-Share library staff, please avoid adding personally identifiable information.

We plan to continue to offer the Thursday, 2 p.m. Office Hours webinar calls as we move into this next phase of the project. We hope you are finding those useful. Remember that we record them and make those recordings available for viewing when you are able.

Many of your libraries have completed all the work related to setting up your authentication (via OpenAthens or a campus service) and the user synchronization work, but for various reasons, some institutions were not able to finish this work before we lost access to the test environments. Over the next couple weeks, I will be emailing the sites that have not completed this work with our suggestions and options for how to proceed. Each institution is a bit different in the work that still needs to be done. Without the test environment and with Alma configuration closed, in many cases we are going to have to plan to rapidly do some work at the time we go live. We know this kind of work entails your IT staff and library staff and can be challenging in normal times and is further complicated by closures. CARLI staff will do our best to have a solution for you as we go live, but note that for a few of you, we may need to continue this work over the summer to get your authentication and user synchronization working well together.  

At this time with Voyager frozen for technical services work, and the Alma test environments no longer available, I want to remind you about some suggested tasks the CARLI Technical Services Committee put together for work you can be doing during this "freeze". While they drew up this list before the closures, you may find this helpfu.

Just before we go live, each library needs to quickly review their new Alma data and verify that it has migrated as you expected. Our Open Office Hours on May 21 covered this process in more detail and you can see the recording of that session here. 

To recap the key dates, we expect that we will need to do bibliographic data review on June 17–19 and fulfillment data review on June 22–23. As we get closer to those dates, and your libraries′ status of being open/closed/staffed are more known, please let us know if your staff will not be able to do data review at that time. We cannot adjust the deadlines, but we can plan to work with you, or for you, as needed if we have some advance notice. We will be sending email about this in early June, we know a lot of this is still unknown at this time.

Also, as we prepare to go live on June 24, we encourage you to start working through CARLI′s version of Ex Libris′ "Go Live Readiness Checklist". It is on the CARLI website in both PDF and Word versions for your use. 

As a reminder, Voyager will remain available for circulation work until 11:59 p.m. Thursday, June 18. Universal Borrowing was suspended due to the COVID closures on March 16 and it is likely we will not be bringing it back online before June 11, which was the date we had originally scheduled to shut it off. We anticipate keeping Voyager and VuFind available in a frozen status, i.e., with no updates to its data, for library staff use for a few months. We do not yet have a specific date for turning Voyager off entirely but would expect to do so sometime in fall 2020. If you need a copy of our project deadlines, you can find that here.

Once again, I want to extend our thanks and appreciation to all the library staff that have worked for so long on this migration project. We are all looking forward to being through this transition phase and settling in on Alma and Primo VE. 

Upcoming CARLI Events and Meetings

Important Dates

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

July 3             CARLI Office Closed for Independence Day

Webinars, Forums, Workshops and Training

June 4              Alma Primo VE Migration Open Office Hours
June 11            Alma Primo VE Migration Open Office Hours
June 18            Alma Primo VE Migration Open Office Hours        

Meetings

June 3              Resource Sharing Committee Meeting
June 3              Executive Committee Meeting
June 8              Preservation Committee Meeting
June 10            Collection Management Committee Meeting
June 10            Instruction Committee Meeting
June 12            Board of Directors Meeting
June 16            OER Task Force Meeting
June 17            Public Services Committee Meeting
June 22            Technical Services Committee Meeting
June 23            Created Content Committee Meeting

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

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