Laying Down the Whack-A-Mole Mallet: One Inexperienced ERM Team’s Story About Adopting the Agile Philosophy to Manage Electronic Resources

The transitory nature of electronic resources requires that staff and faculty working in this realm keep a vigilant eye out for the myriads of changes that inevitably come our way. We are often required to suspend a critical task for a more critical task, and keeping up with all the work we have to do is daunting, if not overwhelming. Electronic resource management (ERM) requires agility. If our aim is to provide superior customer service, we must continually adapt to the landscape of the day. ERM systems have made tremendous progress toward managing electronic resources in the last ten years. Unfortunately, they still lack some basic functionality that require us to use additional tools to complete our day-to-day work efficiently, effectively, and with agility. This is a summarization of the ERM team’s adoption of the agile philosophy and the learning process in applying agile principles to electronic resource management

Re: Structuring, Organizing, Inventing, and Imagining Technical Services

Western Michigan University Libraries migrated to the cloud in 2015 with a new integrated library system (ILS) and discovery layer. In 2016, the Libraries began discussing a complete reorganization. This presentation will outline the changes that occurred in WMU\u27s Technical Services Department as a result of the ILS migration and new overall organizational structure in the Libraries, and how technical services faculty and staff have adapted and seized the opportunity to reinvent the department

Pipe Dreams: Harvesting Local Collections into Primo Using OAI-PMH

Achieve seamless discovery of materials by aggregating disparate data sources into a single discovery interface through the creation of pipes. We will present our process of selecting, curating, configuring, and harvesting from our institutional repository, digital collections, subject guides, and archival finding aids, in order to provide a streamlined user experience and increased discovery. This presentation will share our workflows, including mapping to Dublin Core, configuring the pipes, testing new resources in the Primo Sandbox, and then deploying in our Production instance

Investigation of accessibility of electronic music resources for the visually impaired

The number of students at Western Michigan University (WMU) who require accommodation for disabilities has been increasing in recent years, and is expected to continue to increase in the future. While the University Libraries tries to be responsive to all types of accommodations, students with visual impairments present a particular challenge for libraries to ensure their electronic resources are accessible. Most visually impaired students utilize “screen readers,” software programs that use a speech synthesizer to “read” the text that is displayed on the screen, to navigate web based resources. In an effort to try to better understand how specific screen readers work with our library electronic resources we employed a visually impaired student who is a sophisticated user of screen readers to test our electronic resources.Using a combination of browsers and operating systems, we used Job Access With Speech (JAWS), the most widely used screen reader, and NonVisual Desktop Access (NVDA), an open source screen reader, to test our website, our discovery layer and selected music databases. Databases tested include Music Periodicals Database (ProQuest), RILM Abstracts of Music Literature (EBSCO), and Grove Music Online. As WMU Libraries uses the ExLibris Primo discovery product, our instance of Primo was also tested for accessibility. The presenters will share the findings of the screen reader testing, including a pre-recorded demonstration of a visually impaired student conducting searches with screen readers, and describe our experiences in investigating accessibility of our electronic resources for visually impaired students. Presenters will also make recommendations for improving electronic resources and library services, in general, to better meet the needs of visually impaired patrons