Aaron Neslin received a professional development award to attend the IUG Annual conference. Click here to learn more about the award.
I’m Aaron Neslin, the integrated technologies librarian for Onondaga County Public Library (OCPL). I’m responsible for making everything sure that all the all the ILS functions work seamlessly for staff and patrons, as well as creating reports and pulling numbers for statistical analysis. I was privileged to attend the 24th Annual Innovate Users Group (IUG) in San Francisco last month due to the generosity of a CLRC professional development grant to pay for my cross-country airfare. IUG is the annual conference for users of Innovative Interfaces (III) Library systems (including Polaris, Sierra, Millennium and VTLS).
The three day conference offered product updates, hints and tricks from other uses, networking opportunities and chances to sit down with III upper management. The conference is mainly targeted at system administrators, technical services librarians and system librarians, so all sessions had a heavy focus on technology, cataloging and processing workflows, and using technology to improve patron services. I attended 13 sessions, on subjects that ranged from using stored procedures to automate tasks to presentations by III staff about the future of the library systems, with plenty of poster sessions and networking in between.
My first session was on managing technical services workflows. At OCPL we have a number of tasks that involve complicated workflows that pass tasks between multiple people and departments. The big takeaway is that every time in a workflow, you hand off a task to a different person, you create inefficiency. I hope perform some analysis to see which aspects of our existing workflows to see how many tasks can be done with fewer hand-offs.
Next I attended a session on building a fully functional PAC using the Polaris API. Most libraries use either the public access catalog provided by Polaris, or a paid service to sit on top of the existing one. Richland Library (http://www.richlandlibrary.com/check-it-out/books) used the powerful Polaris API to build their own, with a sleek modern design. While they have an in-house development department to build their own, I hope in the future it will be easier for individual libraries to work with API’s to build unique looking PACs that fulfil the needs of the specific communities they serve.
The Technical services forum brings together catalogers from III libraries all over the world to discuss problems they have and find solutions. I also sat next to the CEO of III during the session. I was able to briefly be a superstar when I helped other librarians solve a problem with a change to an OCLC product by introducing them to regular expressions and SQL pattern matching. I also learned about the incoming INN-REACH product, which will enhance the ability to ILL materials between organizations using a III ILS. Later in the conference I sat in on a session about how a multi-state consortium of public, academic and special libraries used INN-Reach to create an efficient ILL network between their members. One of the most interesting points was that public library materials were in high demand at academic libraries.
The Polaris ILS is largely just a series of stored procedures with a SQL database, so the session on stored procedures gave everyone insight into how to get a good look under the hood and figure out how the system works. It also gave me an idea into some of the tasks I could attempt to write scripts to automate, and a better idea how to do it without risking corrupting the database. I also attended the Advanced SQL Query for Polaris session. As the resident SQL expert at OCPL, it was comforting to learn that I was familiar with most aspects of advanced SQL queries, although I picked up a number of techniques I hope to use to create some very advanced reports. In the PAC forum, we were given exciting news: a replacement for the existing PAC and Mobile Pac is in the works, and we will soon have a cutting edge responsive website as well as a more advanced search function.
Finally, one of the most existing news was that III will be partnering Zepheria to allow III libraries to add linked data capabilities to the catalog. Linked data adds connections between data to leverage the power of internet search engines and break down data silos. This is particularly exciting as previously if an institution wanted to convert their catalog to linked data, it required a separate contract with Zepheria and a large investment of staff time. They’ve also added a free service to allow libraries to optimize search results for their website, found at https://zepheira.com/librarylinkactivation/ .
Overall it was a great conference! Thank you so much CLRC for helping me go.
