ELUNA learns – Access Services

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ELUNA Learns Access Service Session Q & A

Do you all have delivery labels set into your workflow or do you all handle delivery labels outside of Alma?

Christina/CSUN: we tried a number of things with printing labels from Alma but what worked best depended on the MS Office skills and comfort of the various staff. Most exported an Excel list and copied it into templates for printing but some just printed the labels by hand.

How many lockers can you run off one outlet?

Christina/CSUN: one locker unit has the iPad and that is the one that needs the outlet, the other two locker units are attached and plug into that iPad locker. Kevin/CSUF – they only have one locker unit for now but got more through fundraising.

Do you still offer or plan to offer regular hold shelf/pickup in the libraries while you are providing locker/home delivery?

Christina/CSUN: our locker is here to stay once we re-open the library to all, patrons will be able to pickup items anytime from the locker, especially when we are closed, or they can pick up things from the hold shelves once we reinstate those. Kevin/CSUF: they have had hold shelves on during this time as well as lockers already.

Cardiff how did you encourage your students and faculty to download the extension?

From Cardiff: Through email campaigns, library training materials, faculty recommendations and social media.

From Lean Library: we are also launching point-of-need promotional templates for libraries so they can embed ‘download Lean Library’ links on places like the discovery service, LMS etc. We know these to have been particularly effective (some libraries have created their own).

Can you surface Ex Libris Primo results on other websites beyond Google Scholar too?

From Lean Library: yes, this can be done on any website.

Did Cardiff University see increased usage after implementation?

From Cardiff: this is too early for us to say as we’re still in the process of launching it, but we have seen increased usage of e-resources after implementing the browser extension to streamline access, so we think we are likely to here too.

From Lean Library: we’re only just launching the Primo integration but will work on case studies with libraries when we have enough data. We do have a case study with Utah State that shows an increased usage in LibGuides after they were integrated at the point of need, in a similar vein to the Primo integration – so we anticipate anytime we’re increasing discoverability and convenience in this way, we should see increased usage.

Is the Lean Library authentication integration similar to federated access services like Seamless Access?

From Lean Library: Lean Library is not an authentication provider itself, we integrate with the library’s authentication systems like OpenAthens, Shibboleth etc. to streamline the off-campus experience. You can think of us like showing users the door, but they have the key. We are currently exploring whether integration with Seamless Access/GetFTR could help enhance the access experience for patrons.

Thank you for your honest presentation. Part of the concern of Leganto with our staff is that it will take away work from the reserves department (and they would have much less to do), how did you deal with that? It sounds like the work moved to faculty but what about the staff that was already doing the lists before?

From UMW (Olivia Key): We haven’t found that Leganto has reduced the workload for our Reserves department– in fact, it has increased it! Implementing Leganto caused faculty to be more aware of the course reserves system and made a lot more people adopt it. The Reserves staff still has work to approving the lists, pulling books from shelves, and making the items physically available to students. We also keep busy by allowing students and faculty to utilize the “digitization request” feature, which sends us requests to make scans of book sections that are helpful to our patrons doing individual research. (This comes in handy during class projects.) Leganto does put the legwork on faculty who are using primarily electronic resources for their classes as they’re able to find them and connect them to Canvas by themselves, but with our collection growing every semester, that was a welcome change for us (and we are a quite small University). Additionally, there will always be faculty members who prefer to submit their requests through the Reserves department rather than using the features in Leganto, so I wouldn’t worry too much about your staff being short on tasks.

From Seneca (Jane Foo): We didn’t have a reserves / e-reserves service since 2010 so we did not have to worry about concerns from existing reserves staff / department. With the pandemic we have been able to shift many of our staff who were doing front desk work to more (online) reference specific roles, and we trained two of our Borrower Staff to handle the Alma backend process for Leganto. Much of the Leganto workload lies with our liaison librarians who are using Leganto to collaborate with faculty.

I’m not familiar with Leganto, can you explain why lists cannot be duplicated from semester to semester?

From UMW (Olivia Key) : The short answer is that they can, but in this case, we’d uploaded so many scanned files during our remote learning period that it ended up being faster for us to recreate lists rather than manually deleting all of those files from each list. So far, I haven’t found a better solution, but please let me know if you find something better!

From Seneca (Jane Foo): Lists can be duplicated. We are doing a lot of testing at the moment to tweak our end-of-semester process since we are not able to use the automatic rollover process, and we are evaluating two options: 1) reset an existing list and re-use it for the next semester and 2) locking lists (as library admin) and asking faculty to create a new copy for the new semester. Chances are they we will likely have to use both methods (or 1 and a manual roll over).

What is in your opinion the biggest challenge now that Leganto has become so popular with faculty? Staffing or technical or?

From UMW: I’d say the biggest challenge for us is staffing. We love that our faculty are using Leganto and that they’re reaching out to me to place new items on Reserve, but their requests often come with requests to scan items, which means I need plenty of student assistant help. Generally, the biggest challenge is gearing up at the beginning of each semester, before my student assistants have arrived on campus, so I have to do all of it- creating lists, pulling books from the stacks, changing item locations, scanning excerpts, etc. It’s also been a challenge to get faculty to consider either a) getting their lists to me before summer & winter breaks or b) considering e-books & OER resources, which are a lot easier (and faster) to integrate into Leganto.

Will slides from the presentations be able for review?

Yes, slides will be uploaded to the ELUNA Document Repository.