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What is the workflow like at the beginning of the semester (when presumably the volume of reserves requests is highest)? How tedious/ergonomic is it? Has anyone made tools to help alleviate any pain points with working with large numbers of reserves? (IAN)
What differences are there in the workflow for professors' personal copies or other materials the library manages, but that are not part of the collection? (IAN)
How are students discovering course reserves? Is it integrated into your discovery layer, or through a separate interface? (IAN)
Are electronic reserves being handled in FOLIO, or in another system like Ares? If there are two systems, are they being presented to students as separate or merged interfaces? (IAN)
What kind of statistics do you need about course reserves usage, and how are you getting them? (IAN)
What sort of clean-up is done on previous semesters' data? Do old reserve records stick around forever, or are they pruned after X semesters? What about terms? (IAN)
If you could change 3 things about the course reserves app with the wave of a magic wand, what would they be? (IAN)
Do you use locations, loan types, or both? (TARA)
<<Add Questions Here>>
Closing Questions
Do we want to schedule a second courses session to continue this discussion?
How do we want to share the information we learned today? Create an "implementers guide" to Courses? Update the tips and tricks page?
Notes
Time
Topic
Notes
6:00
Housekeeping
We briefly go over some housekeeping. Folks are reminded to fill out the Marshall Breeding Survey if they have not already. Tara reminds us that we will be looking at upgrades next time, and asks that folks please add questions if they have not already.
8:11
Courses Demo
Tara does an extremely abbreviated demo of courses, including a tour of settings, creating a course, adding an instructor, and adding an item
14:30
Start of Semester Workflow
Ian asks: "What is the workflow like at the beginning of the semester (when presumably the volume of reserves requests is highest)? How tedious/ergonomic is it? Has anyone made tools to help alleviate any pain points with working with large numbers of reserves?"
(15:30) Eileen says Holy Cross has a check in and check out note for each individual item. It would be useful if there was a check in and check out note applied automatically when an item is placed on reserve for a course.
Erin asks what the note says. Eileen says they say "reserve item"--its purpose is to remind the desk staff to let the patron know about reserves policies, and when the item is returned, to alert staff of the shelving location
Erin says that there is a generic Jira about providing modal text for certain locations requested by Cornell. It is waiting for developers.
Eileen notes that removing notes is also arduous.
17:30
Courses PO
Tara reminds us that Courses does not currently have a product owner, which is necessary for any of the requested features to move forward. Erin notes that there is no Product Owner or Development Team. Index Data addresses bugs within capacity, but is not funded to do courses. There is no infrastructure to move things forward currently.
Tara asks about how people are making the best out of what there currently is.
18:30
Position of "add items"
Kara from Wellesley notes that one ergonomic irritation is that the add item feature is at the bottom of the screen. This makes it challenging to add many items--the user has to scroll each time.
19:12
Deleting loan type is not automated
Michael Bednar seconds what Eileen says, and adds: when you delete the item from the course, it deletes the course reserves item, but each individual item has to be modified on the item page in inventory. Loan type is NOT removed. Erin reminds us that it should update location.
Bob at Holy Cross notes that they changed their loan rules to rely solely on location in order to circumvent this limitation
20:46
Reserves Transit Notes
TK
Action Items
Michael says that they have a point for reserves. Reserves has its own location. This allows FOLIO to display an in-transit note when the item is returned, which helps get around having to add check-in notes.
Tara asks if there is a service point at the circulation desk and a secondary one for reserves. Michael says it is not a service point, it is a pick up point or a location. It is a separate location.
Erin notes that we should play with this and get it documented.
22:45
Courses "Templates"?
Ian summarizes: there are a certain number of fields that need to be added to reserves--some combination of notes, location, loan type, typically. Additionally, there must be a remove process. This process is different for each library. Ian says that if there is a way to make this general enough (a template of some sort), this would be very useful to many libraries. Folks agree.
24:00
View Only Courses Permissions
Holy Cross is experiencing difficulties with permissions for staff vs students. There is no way for students with "view only" permissions to see what course an item is on reserve for from the reserves page. It would be useful for students to be able to see reserves without having to edit.
Erin notes that this sounds like a regression--Bob and Tara will follow up with Erin.
26:11
Physical Labels/Reserves Volume
Suzy says that her institution does not use check in/check out notes. Their reserves are at circulation, and they use physical labels--it's one less pop up notes. They do have the same problem with loan type mentioned by other libraries. Course reserves requests are down significantly at their institution.
(27:20) Tara asks as a side thought if use of electronic reserves has increased, and wonders how that's being handled.
(27:40) Laszlo notes that reserves does decrease, but is still extremely high volume. The concern at Stanford is the amount of manual processing steps both putting things on and reserve and taking them off. Stanford's systems group created a function to de-reserve items elegantly via API. Lack of automation is a serious concern.
28:50
Cool Tools for Reserves
Tara asks about "cool tools" for reserves. Erin mentions that Duke has added two cool tools to FOLIO itself--the LTI functionality, and the functionality to host document scans in Box.
Ian asks about differences in workflow between adding personal copies and adding items owned by the library
(30:30) Eileen says that Holy Cross puts a note in the item saying that it is a professor's personal copy. When items are taken off reserve, these items are placed in a separate pile and professors pick them up.
(31:00) Chelsea adds that when faculty drop off 50 items, it becomes very tedious to add individual notes to all items. She wishes that there was a faster way to handle this particular type of fast add.
(32:00) Michael notes that all personal copies at his institution are permanent reserves--they are on a 10 year cycle. They do not get cleared off reserves. They are notes by the professor's last name as the call number.
(33:10) Tara mentions that libraries handle permanent reserves differently as well.
(33:25) Suzy says that personal copies are handled semester-by-semester. The professor's name and course number are used as the call number, similar to Michael. Suzy mentions that sometimes there are issues with VuFind. In their case, there is an export job scheduled twice per day, and items do not show up right away.
(34:50) Eileen says that at the end of the semester, the library suppressed all personal copies. They stay in and retain their barcode so that there is a record, and they are not requestable. Laszlo says that they also suppress records in order to reuse them within a reasonable time. Every summer there is a purge of fast-add records. It is an automated process.
36:00
Discovery
Ian's next question: how are students discovering course reserves? We look at an example of VuFind, Blacklight at Stanford is mentioned. Laurence says that EDS also has a courses module. Erin explains that many discovery layers have a scoped down search that serves as a courses view.
(37:20) Eileen says that Holy Cross did something special in EDS and Courses. There is a placard in EDS.
(38:00) Michael says that they use EDS. It seems to break down every two months--asks if anyone has experience with this, if they could reach out. Others recommend opening a ticket, and it will be fixed.
39:30
Electronic Reserves
"Are electronic reserves being handled in FOLIO, or in another system like Ares? If there are two systems, are they being presented to students as separate or merged interfaces?" One way is to include a link to a file stored somewhere else. Are there others? Eileen says that electronic reserves are totally separate--they are handled in Canvas. Laszlo says Stanford uses the fast add process. This is more book keeping--it would be ideal if there were better ways of linking a print resource to an e-resource. Suzy uses a fast add record and links to the inventory record.
42:00
Statistics
Statistics--how are you doing statistics for course reserves? Bob at Holy Cross used LDP. LDP is not used by all libraries--Bywater has their own solution. They look at loans, as well as items that never circulated. Libraries like to give these reports to professors to demonstrate the efficacy of their loans. Ian notes one challenge which is that because it relies on what is currently in the system, it is not possible to do this after a clean out. (44:50) Kara uses Google CoLab to do circulation reporting. Erin notes that this is "badass data work." Kara adds that Panorama's courses functionality is very limited currently, but hopefully that will eventually be a solution. (Suzy agrees.) Erin says that the data is available in LDP.
(47:30) Tara notes that all of these reporting functions focus on circulation. She asks if there is anything else anyone is recording statistics on. For example, what was on reserve for a certain year? How many items were on reserve and when were they submitted? (Someone) keeps these statistics manually--recording both circulation and what is requested.
(49:20) ACRL stats may be problematic--there's yearly reporting, and pulling out reserves may be complicated.
50:00
End of semester processes
Ian notes that some libraries do not like leaving past terms in FOLIO. In order to delete a term, all dependencies must be deleted, but Ian has found a lingering dependency around instructors that is not available in the UI. Erin says that once we have developers, it would maybe be possible to add an "inactive" status to handle this better. Duke has the same issue--they imported classes from 2016 onwards.
(52:00) Suzy notes that they have seen this as well and must sometimes submit a ticket to get things removed. Suzy takes off the item record, the holding record, and then marks the instance for deleting, as well as marking it for suppression.
(53:00) Someone in chat asks if removing terms is a best practice. Erin says: not necessarily, but it is a known gap. Historical information is valuable, but FOLIO does not have this ability yet. Laszlo notes that this is desired by Stanford as well. There is generally a desire to be able to reuse courses.
54:45
Housekeeping
Tara asks what the most productive thing to do with all these ideas and thoughts actually is. Erin says to put them into slack--not everyone is comfortable searching Jira, and much has been captured already. Erin tried to capture a stub Jira as requests come up. A wiki page may also be valuable. Erin reiterates that anyone who is interested in the PO role should reach out to her.
(58:00) Tara asks what the best way to make this information available would be. We agree that creating a wiki page would be great.
1:00:00
Inventory Integration
There's no way to get from inventory to Courses when an item is on reserve. A closer integration between courses and inventory is desired. Erin suggests that this could be a plug-in for Inventory.
Action Items
Tara Barnett will create an "Implementers' Guide" to courses using the material gathered here