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Establish baseline productivity and staffing at each institution to allow for future assessment of changes and development.
- Productivity - Appear to be very similar levels of troubleshooting volume and nature of incidents - (Some analysis of the nature of incidents is still underway)
- January-March 2013 - Columbia 244, Cornell 251 (very close month to month totals) - Accuracy of these is limited by different sources of information.
- Staffing levels and general workflow - Very similar numbers of individuals and time spend handling troubleshooting work
The team gathered information about FTE involvement, troubleshooting job responsibilities, typical top-level workflow, and volume of incidents handled. We have concluded that staffing and productivity levels related to e-resource troubleshooting are very similar between Cornell and Columbia. Both partners currently have front line staff scheduled to address incoming issues, refer to specialists, and follow up from approximately 8am to 5pm, Monday-Friday. Supervisory level staff handle some high-priority incidents over evenings and weekend. Each CUL handles a similar volume of troubleshooting traffic. From January to March 2013, Columbia received 244 incidents and Cornell received 251. Precise comparisons are limited by the varied ways in which each partner receives incident reports. More detailed information about this can be found on the Problem Examples and Staffing levels and general workflow pages.
Continuing work:
The team has begun working on Phase 2 objectives, particularly in the areas of better harmonizing points of discord and recommending tools to enhance the potential for joint 2CUL troubleshooting. A few of the eventual recommendations we will be making will be dependent on other 2CUL efforts, such as the timeline for a joint LMS. Some of the specific topics or tools we have been exploring areBased on our work so far, the team is looking more deeply at the following areas and tools to better integrate troubleshooting efforts:
- Off-campus access and variable browser configuration testing - BrowserStack - implementation underway.
- Troubleshooting tracking system - A single incident tracking system for all troubleshooting reports to automatically populate (Jira? other?).
- LIBIT-L@cornell.edu and cul-eproblem@columbia.edu or other appropriate sources of reports should feed directly into the system to avoid re-entry.
- Easy to identify Cornell or Columbia issues
- Ability to route issues
- Common ERM/LMS - Information access and data normalization? Variables include:
- Serials Solutions ERM Suite and Consortial add-on - cost, implementation & migration workload, gain vs. loss regarding Alma migration
- Alma implementation timeline
- Workflow and information access - Consolidate useful information into parallel wiki's or consolidated wiki? We are working to better organize and eventually consolidate useful information about policies, procedures, and best practices.
- Develop guidelines of what to handle at 2CUL level, what to route to "owning" library.
- Provide a dashboard of common responses, access to troubleshooting tools, and contact information for us4e by all troubleshooting staff.
- Automated link/access checking - Callisto - http://sharpmoon.com/callisto/
- This product has to potential to improve our pro-active troubleshooting efforts by helping us identify access problems before our users report them and ensuring that IP address ranges are properly implemented by vendors. Callisto allows for a consortial view, allowing us to compare access to resources across the 2CUL partners.