CARLI News June 30, 2020

Lorna Engels 1954–2020 

We are heartbroken to announce that CARLI Library Systems Coordinator Lorna Engels passed away on June 27. The outpouring of love shown to Lorna attests to the impact she had on so many, including all of us at CARLI. She was a wonderful, creative, and caring person and we will miss her. Many of you may have known or worked with Lorna in her work at the University of Illinois Library, at Heartland Community College, and at CARLI, where she has been a part of the staff since July 2006. 

"Lorna Engels, 66, of Savoy, IL passed away June 27 at Carle Hospital in Champaign following a stroke. 

She was born in Freeport, IL on April 16, 1954, to John H. and Grace M. (Walker) Engels. She was educated in Freeport schools, studied at Appalachian Bible Institute, and earned degrees from Highland Community College and the University of Illinois. 

To her work life at the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois, and to her church life at New Covenant Fellowship in Champaign, Lorna brought her calm competence, her deep chuckle, her creativity, and her ability to guide any wandering discussion back to the agenda on the table. She bore all life’s indignities with gentle stoicism and kind-hearted wit. Lorna was a people-loving introvert, strong in her faith, and self-effacing in all her interactions. 

Lorna leaves an enormous hole in the lives of her brother Roger Engels and sister-in-law Nancy Moore, of her colleagues in the CARLI Office and in academic libraries across Illinois, and of a large and lovingly curated collection of quirky friends, whom she made throughout her well-lived life. "

A celebration of Lorna's life will be held at a later date.

CARLI′s 89 I-Share Libraries are Now Live on Alma Primo VE

On June 24, the eighty-nine libraries in I-Share went live in Ex Libris′ Alma Primo VE. The successful migration of the I-Share libraries concludes a years-long process of selection, training, data review, testing, and configuration. We encourage everyone involved in this work to take a moment to pat yourselves on the back and congratulate your colleagues. It is a job well-done.
 
We are tremendously grateful to the staff of our I-Share libraries, the Ex Libris project staff, and to the CARLI staff, who went above and beyond in completing the seemingly endless tasks involved in an implementation of this size and complexity. This is a major milestone—bringing 89 libraries all online together—and it would have been impossible without the collaborative work that continues to make CARLI a successful and thriving library consortium.

We know that the work continues. We are working with individual libraries to complete their cutover and to resolve the inevitable issues arising in a large project like this. We will be working hard to quickly respond to the support tickets, prioritizing the most urgent requests. Please continue to send any questions or issues to CARLI Support.

Thanks to our I-Share library staff for your patience and understanding, and for all the work that has gone into this enormous project.

Read the press release at https://www.carli.illinois.edu/sites/files/files/I-ShareAlmaLive062920.pdf.

ILDS Normal Delivery Resumes on July 6 

Normal delivery for ILDS will be resuming on July 6 for all libraries who are ready. We are asking libraries who want to begin receiving delivery on July 6 or later who haven′t already contacted CARLI, RAILS or IHLS to please contact the help desk at the vendor who handles your delivery, either RAILS or IHLS. The email for the help desk at RAILS is railsdelivery@railslibraries.info. The email for the help desk at IHLS is ihlsdelivery@illinoisheartland.org.
 
If you don′t know which system does your delivery you can look that information up online on L2 by searching for your library and looking under system.  
 
Please contact CARLI Support if you have any questions.

Access to 3000+ Wiley Online Books for All Governing Members

CARLI is thrilled to announce an agreement that provides full-text access for CARLI Governing Members to 3000+ Wiley Online Books that published between the years 2017-2021. All titles have unlimited access for CARLI members through June 30, 2021 and may be used as course materials or for course reserves. Direct links may be embedded into course management systems; however, materials may not be used to fulfill interlibrary loan requests until July 2021. In July 2021, CARLI will purchase permanent ebook acquisitions using data from the previous year. Also, from July 2021-June 2023, CARLI Governing Members will be able to purchase at the rate negotiated for the CARLI agreement, additional titles with consortial access; please contact CARLI Support for more information.

I-Share libraries will not need to do anything to add the MARC records for this content. In July, CARLI will begin sharing MARC records for these in the Network Zone for access in Primo VE. For additional information about using the Wiley Online Library, access to usage statistics and the training hub, and for information about MARC records for non-I-Share libraries visit the FY21 CARLI Ebooks Project page.

Access to the Online Wiley Library is based on the campus IP ranges that member libraries have provided to CARLI. If you need to update this information, please contact CARLI Support. If your IP address is associated with your institution, including use of your campus authentication system, you should already have access to these materials. Wiley also provides access via other methods, more information can be found on their website on Access and Authentication.

Consortial funding is for FY21. With member support/funding, the ebook program could continue after June 2021.

Access to Oxford University Press Oxford Scholarship Online for All Governing Members

CARLI has completed an agreement with Oxford University Press to provide access to all Oxford University Press ebooks on their Oxford Scholarship Online platform with publication dates of 2018-present with monthly updates throughout the July 2020 to June 2021 access period, plus all content published on their platform for 18 Partner Presses. CARLI will purchase ebooks in July 2021 from both Wiley and Oxford based upon consortial usage data. We will share more information about content, access, and use in July.

Open Educational Resources Update 

OER Committee

As of July 1, the Open Educational Resources Task Force will be the Open Educational Resources Committee! 

CARLI-OER Email List

CARLI has an email list for members to share and discuss all aspects of open educational resources including working with faculty, developing a program, new resources and more. Anyone from a CARLI member may join this list. 

CARLI Open Illinois Initiative Web Site

OER Task Force members have updated the Open Illinois Initiative webpages. The site was created as a place for members to learn about Open Educational Resources and to use as they develop their own local webpages and programs.

Open Education Network and Summit 2020 Recordings

The Open Textbook Network (OTN) announced during their annual Summit, earlier this month, that they are changing their name to the Open Education Network. The new name better reflects their belief that open education has the power to transform higher education. CARLI remains a consortial member and as such all CARLI governing members have benefits associated with being a member of CARLI. 

Many of the Summit 2020 sessions were recorded and are available on the Open Textbook Network YouTube Channel. Sessions include Copyright and OER, Moving Initiatives Forward, Printing Open Textbooks, Fair Use and OER?, Supporting Faculty and Students with Remote Learning, and more.

Save the Date: Two Upcoming Managing Electronic Resources in Alma Webinars

Coming soon! CARLI′s Commercial Products Committee will be hosting two webinars related to Alma and electronic resources. 

One webinar will focus on managing and cleaning up e-resources during the Alma transition. The other is geared towards small libraries and navigating the challenge of having a small staff while dealing with all the changes that a new ILS brings. The presenters we have lined up are both veterans of Alma implementations and are excited to share their experiences with CARLI. 

We are working to schedule these webinars for the end of July and beginning of August, so look for an announcement on the CARLI web site.

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 will be held 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. Contribute your memories online.

We look forward to hearing what CARLI means to you!

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. 

Alma Primo VE Update

At 1 p.m. on Wednesday, June 24, 2020, the 89 CARLI I-Share libraries began using Ex Libris Alma and Primo VE as our library services platform and discovery service. This cutover was the last major milestone in an implementation project that began in January 2019. These services replace the Ex Libris Voyager product that ILCSO (a CARLI predecessor) purchased in 2002 from Endeavor Information Systems. During the 18 years that we ran Voyager, the total number of participating libraries rose from 44 to 91, and with the Robert Morris and MacMurray closures this spring, back to 89 participating institutions.

Ex Libris has informed us that CARLI was the largest consortium to implement Alma and Primo VE on one cutover date. Many consortia prefer to do a cutover in waves of cohorts over several months. CARLI opted not to prolong the cutover to allow every institution to go live during the less active summer term. We also expected going live at the same time would minimize the amount of time that resource sharing between I-Share libraries would need to be suspended. Of course, those plans were made well before the COVID closures and ILDS service suspension led us to turn off I-Share resource sharing in March. At this writing, we have not yet turned resource sharing back on (called AFN-Automated Fulfillment Network in Alma). AFN will not be available until the week of July 6, at the earliest. Please watch your email and the CARLI website for updates. Some member institutions are retrieving local request materials for their patrons and making them available via various no-contact means. Libraries that would like to have local requesting, the option for their users to place remote requests for their institution’s items only, turned on in Alma should send a request to CARLI Support.

With the shift from focusing on the migration from Voyager to Alma to settling in on using Alma for day-to-day operations, the CARLI staff will be able to focus more attention to developing, documenting, and sharing instructions and best practices for using Alma and Primo VE. We also expect many of the CARLI committees to work on Alma and Primo VE related projects during the coming year and beyond. We have put up a starting point web page on "post Day One activity" if you are struggling with where to begin now that Alma and Primo VE are live, this might be a good place to start.

Our weekly "Open Office Hours" webinars have attracted a lot of participants, with attendance in the 200 range most weeks. We do plan to continue these sessions through the end of July 2020, although we will be moving from Ex Libris′ WebEx platform to our Zoom. Please see the new connectivity information on the CARLI calendar.

While this format has been successful, we anticipate that members will want more topically focused sessions as the proverbial dust of the migration settles and we start thinking about developing efficient new workflows and practices. Again, watch your email and the CARLI website for more, but do plan to continue to join us on Thursday′s at 2 p.m. through the month of July.

As you would expect, the CARLI staff are handling a large number of support tickets right now. We are doing our best to resolve matters quickly, but your wait time may be a bit longer than usual during this next week or so. It′s been a long time since we were all new to a system at once and many of you have not needed to ask for much help with Voyager after so many years of use, so we′d like to remind you of some tips for reporting problems to us. To help us be able to resolve your support tickets more quickly, we suggest you include the following information when you send a question or problem report to us at support@carli.illinois.edu: Include your I-Share 3-letter code in the subject line. Try to briefly summarize the problem in the subject line, e.g., "XXX needs help with fiscal period close" is better than "XXX Alma question". If the problem has to do with Alma inventory records, please include the Alma MMS ID of at least one record that illustrates the issue. If the problem is with access to the system or permissions within the system, check if coworkers are having the same problem and give us your best ideas about who is affected. We like resolving support tickets quickly without having to contact you several times for more details, so providing us your best description up front saves everyone some time on getting issues resolved. Thanks for your patience as we get through these first few weeks.

Once again, we appreciate all the time and effort your staff, your IT colleagues and everyone has put into this project. We are all glad to have June 24 in the rear-view mirror and we look forward to many years of I-Share on Alma and Primo VE.

Alma and Primo VE Works in Progress

In a consortium of CARLI′s size, there will always be room for improvement! We have created a spot where we are recording an informal list of topics or items in Alma and Primo VE that CARLI staff and/or CARLI Committees are planning to work on in the near future after.  These areas are the "works in progress" that we will all improve upon as we learn more about Alma and Primo VE and the best ways to use them in our consortial environment.

This will continue to be updated over time, and we hope that you will find it helpful. If you have any questions or suggestions, don't hesitate to let us know by sending a message to CARLI Support.

Creating User Guides for Primo VE Webpage

The CARLI Instruction and Public Services Committees are pleased to share with CARLI members a new resource on our website devoted to Creating User Guides for Primo VE that expands on the information presented at April′s Getting Ready for Primo VE online program. 
 
CARLI members have distinctive identities and patron needs. These distinctive identities will be reflected in each library's customized instance of Primo VE. The joint subcommittee determined that this resource should offer suggestions rather than prescriptions, and presents insights into the content and concepts that librarians may want to address in guides, as well as advice on the form and format for these resources informed by an examination of the materials generated by libraries already using Primo VE.

Topics covered in the guide include:

• What to Include
• What to Consider When Creating Guides
• Where to House / Position the Guides
• Helpful Examples and Further Resources

You will also find links to both CARLI Customization Information on how members can customize their local view of Primo VE and a list of libraries that have implemented Primo VE so that CARLI members can view how other institutions present information to their users.

Sending Correspondence to CARLI 

While our staff is still working from home, our mail is being held at the post office and we are picking up infrequently. Most of our correspondence can be handled via email, but there are some things like payments that still require the mail. 

If you need to send a payment, please make sure not to mail it to the CARLI office. There is an address on your statement to send the payment to. This will help to ensure that your payment is received and applied in a timely manner.  

If you have any questions, please contact CARLI Support.

All Committees Webinar

On July 17, from 1:30–2:30 p.m., CARLI will host an All Committees Webinar to kick off the FY21 evaluation of the current committee structure. Committees have been asked to evaluate their charge in order to consider whether the group should continue, cease, combine, or split into more than one committee, and to make recommendations for committees that reflect the changing library landscape and the implementation of the new I-Share library management system environment. Initial recommendations will be presented to the Board for review at the December 2020 Board meeting, with a final plan presented for approval at the March 2021 Board meeting. Connection information for the meeting will be sent to committee members via their committee email lists.

Preservation Tip: Digital Preservation, An Interview with Matt Short, Metadata Librarian at Northern Illinois University

Mary Burns, Special Collections Catalog Librarian at Northern Illinois University

For 2019–2020, the CARLI Preservation Committee is sharing a series of interviews with preservation managers, conservators, and other library specialists who graciously described their experiences on preservation and conservation topics of interest to CARLI libraries. 

This month, Mary Burns, Special Collections Catalog Librarian at Northern Illinois University asked Matt Short, Metadata Librarian at Northern Illinois University, to share some of his experiences with digital preservation and digital preservation policies. The goal of digital preservation is to provide perpetual, uninterrupted access to digital content as technology changes over the course of time. 

Read this full article.  

Read additional interviews from the Preservation Committee’s Learning from our Collective Experiences series.

Other Library News

Research Shows Virus Undetectable on Five Highly Circulated Library Materials After Three Days 

In the first phase of a project to disseminate and develop science-based information about how materials can be handled to mitigate exposure to staff and visitors, scientists have found that the virus SARS-CoV-2 that causes COVID-19 is not detectable on five common library materials after three days.  

The findings are part of the Reopening Archives, Libraries, and Museums (REALM) Project designed to generate scientific information to support the handling of core museum, library, and archival materials as these institutions begin to resume operations and reopen to the public. The first phase of the research is focusing on commonly found and frequently handled materials, especially in U.S. public libraries.   

Over the past few weeks, scientists at Battelle tested the virus on a variety of surfaces, in environments with standard temperature and relative humidity conditions typically found in air-conditioned office space. The virus was undetectable on the paper inside of a book and mylar book jackets after three days. 

Lab testing of physical items followed literature reviews conducted by Battelle to help define the scope of the project′s research and the information needs of libraries, archives, and museums. Last week, the REALM Project released "Systematic Literature Review of SARS-CoV-2: Spread, Environmental Attenuation, Prevention, and Decontamination," prepared by Battelle. This is an in-depth review of published literature on virus transmission, attenuation, and decontamination methods that can inform discussion and decisions about operations in archives, libraries, and museums.   

Battelle will be initiating lab testing on an additional five materials this month, with results expected by the end of July. Examples of public library reopening plans are being collected, curated, and shared to the website this week. The research reports will inform development of toolkit resources, content, and programming that will help translate the findings for real-world applications in museums, libraries, and archives. 

The REALM Project is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the primary source of federal funding for museums and libraries; and OCLC, a nonprofit library technology and research organization; in partnership with Battelle, a not-for-profit global scientific research and development organization. 

Project updates are posted as they become available. 

Those interested can also sign up through the project website to receive timely email updates when new information is released. 

Ensuring an Accurate Count of College Students and Towns in the 2020 Census

The U.S. Census Bureau is reaching out to colleges and universities with significant off-campus student populations to help ensure they are counted in the right place in the 2020 Census. Earlier this week, Director Dr. Steven Dillingham sent a letter to college and university presidents asking them to provide roster information for off-campus students. This information allows the Census Bureau to count the students where they would have been staying on April 1, 2020, even if they went home early due to a school closure or shift to distance learning.

The Census Bureau asked presidents for assistance in counting students who may not have responded on their own by sharing basic demographic information already provided to the university for off-campus students. Census Bureau staff began calling school officials June 16, and at a minimum will request full name, date of birth, and local and alternative addresses. By having access to this information, the Census Bureau can ensure college students are counted in the right place, including removing duplicate responses to the census or to count the student (if there is no other record of the same individual in another location). As with all information the Census Bureau collects, this personal information is protected by law.

For more information on how the 2020 Census can impact college students and how to count them, visit 2020census.gov/grads. 

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

Meetings

July 2             Alma and Primo VE Open Office Hours
July 9             Alma and Primo VE Open Office Hours
July 16           Alma and Primo VE Open Office Hours
July 23           Alma and Primo VE Open Office Hours
July 30           Alma and Primo VE Open Office Hours

Webinars, Forums, Workshops and Training

July 14–16      CARLI Counts        

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 CARLI Support. Subscribe to CARLI email lists to receive the latest news on topics of interest to you.