Collaborative Futures Mini Conferences

The PDF Pitstop: Tuning up File Accessibility

In the November 2024 release, “Conditional Automatic Forwarding of Document Delivery” was added to Alma. While quality, OCR-processed PDFs are the standard for ILL chapters and articles, this feature enabled staff to intervene on file delivery where the patron requires additional accessibility remediation to make the file fully usable. This became fondly known among OCUL as the "PDF Pitstop."

The PDF Pitstop was tested and configured by the Alma Resource Sharing Working Group, and McMaster University Libraries implemented promptly, adding a new stop on the route to resource sharing file accessibility. In this presentation, we’ll share our local processes for operationalizing the Pitstop for eligible students, as well as insights from our first year of activity.

Widening the table: Collaboratively responding to accessibility issues in a shared library service platform

The American Library Association’s code of ethics recognizes academic libraries are expected to dismantle barriers that impede users with disabilities from benefiting from what libraries have to offer. Within the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL) there are numerous initiatives that strive to meet this expectation. Situated in the OCUL Collaborative Futures project, this presentation examines an initiative to respond to accessibility issues in our shared library service platform. Members of the Collaborative Futures Accessibility subcommittee will describe the “accessibility monitoring table.” The table lists complex accessibility problems that have been reported and include resources to support individuals in understanding, assessing, and responding to the issues. The table aims to allow for tracking complex issues, to progressively advance their resolution, and to ensure their complex nature does not result in their unresolved status from becoming “normalized” as the expected behaviour of a library service platform. In this presentation, we describe the current design of the table, how it aims to support responders, and its limitations. We hope that individuals and groups within Collaborative Futures universities (and beyond) will recognize opportunities the table provides for responding to barriers that impact users with disabilities. 

A license to lend: Supporting whole e-book interlibrary loan in Alma and Primo

As the University of Toronto Libraries (UTL) moves further down the path of e-preferred collection practices, we are also making a concerted effort to assert favourable interlibrary loan license terms when undertaking negotiations for e-book packages, resulting in a growing corpus of e-books we can now make available for full-text and DRM (digital rights management)-free interlibrary loan. To date, UTL has successfully negotiated whole e-book lending terms with 5 major publishers, with approximately 290,000 titles being made available for full-text and DRM-free interlibrary loan.

In this presentation, we will discuss how we elected to represent these new license terms in Alma and Primo, and will demonstrate how these e-books are ultimately made available to borrowing libraries using Alma Resource Sharing. Attendees will leave with examples and configurations that can be made in Alma to support e-book ILL. We will also discuss our vision for the growth of our e-book lending program and the challenges that persist.

Slow Cataloguing for Rare Books: Remediating and Enhancing Records for the Bertrand Russell Library Collection 

McMaster University holds the archives and personal books of the British philosopher and pacifist Bertrand Russell (1872-1970). In my talk, I will describe a long-term project to remediate and enhance the Bib Records for Russell Library books according to rare material cataloguing standards. Strategies include reimporting records from OCLC, adding 561 and 563 fields for provenance and binding, including controlled vocabulary terms in the 655 field, and adding name authorities for former owners, binders, printers, and publishers. Although more rapid and larger-scale interventions like batch editing can be helpful, rare materials cataloguing requires close examination of the physical books and often necessitates a record-by-record approach. I hope to spark more discussion of how OCUL institutions are approaching the work of describing rare materials in Alma/Primo.

Invoicing: EDI versus AI

This presentation will explore the set up and workflows of electronic data interchange (EDI) invoicing with major vendors versus the new feature in Alma to scan and use AI to create an invoice. 

NDE from the other side: What I know now

The University of Toronto was one of the first Institutions to go live with the new Primo Next Discovery Experience (NDE) user interface. In this session, I’ll talk a little bit about our reasons for going live so early, some lessons we learned along the way, and what I wish I’d known before we started!