Our Work:
The development team at Gottesman Libraries has continued to support the library and various digital endeavors at Teachers College during the Spring 2021 semester. Some of the outcomes are listed here:
Library Website/App/Blog
- Made UX/UI enhancements across the website, app, and blog to provide patrons/users a better user experience.
- Adding new APIs to automatize the updating of News Cafe Book Display and Staff Picks.
- Updated text editors and enable ALT text input for images.
PK
- Cleaned up PocketKnowledge collections. check it here
- Identified existing PocketKnowledge collections and listed them on a new page.
- Resolved PocketKnowledge spam issues.
Other Work
- Performed regular maintenance work of our various products, systems, and micro-services.
- Attended several support tickets for the Library website, Library app, PocketKnowledge, and Vialogues.
- Deprecating non-essential/non-migratable services, preparing for the future service transfer.
- Helped update tax and invoice settings to streamline future payments for all paid services.
- Analyzed the Vialogues copyright issues and presented Vialogues usage.
- Working on account profile vulnerability.
The Library Tech Eco-System in 2021:
This is a consolidated list of all the digital products, systems, and micro-services that the dev team has designed/developed/customized and is currently responsible for:
Library Systems
- Library Website and Blog
- Library Blog had around 130k visits
- The most popular page http://blog.library.tc.columbia.edu/b/9886-Why-is-Educat...Important-in-Our-Life with a total of 3,258,433 visits.
- iOS and Android Library Apps
- Library Search
- Summon / Serial Solutions & Sierra
- PocketKnowledge (Elasticsearch)
- Vialogues (Elasticsearch)
- Library Payment System with PayPal
- Library Catalog (EDUCAT)
- Library Support (Freshdesk and Freshchat)
- Room Reservation iPads (Displays outside meeting rooms)
- Content Management System to create/edit/manage -
- Content on Library subpages
- Library Blog
- News
- Events
- Rooms
- People and Permissions
- Files (uploaded in blog posts and other applications)
- Shortened URLs
Other Systems
- PocketKnowledge
- Teachers College Digital Archives
- 152,000+ items from 8929 contributors
- Vialogues
- Video Discussion Tool
- 58,882+ Vialogues with 508,000+ comments from 42,270 verified users
- Check here for more Vialogues usage and stats
Micro-Services
- Library Login/Profile
- MyEdLab (80,000+ accounts / 45,000+ verified)
- Library Single Sign-On service (TCCAS)
- TC data and TC directory (UNI + EdLab Account Integration)
- Library Search (ElasticSearch)
- Search across all our applications and systems
- Easily scalable and adaptable search / More filters could be applied
- Library URL shortener
- Used in newsletters for tracking
- Image Processor
- Content Delivery Network for images uploaded to any application
- Image modifier
- File Previewer
- Used in PocketKnowledge to generate preview images for any types of documents
- Auto Captions --(embed in Viagoues)
- Used in Vialogues for auto-captioning videos
- Not been using since no Vialogue has been uploaded by the library team at this moment
- Nginx
- Used for load balancing and secure all of our traffic
- Manage all SSL certificates for all of our applications
- Metabase
- Create data dashboards for our applications/services
- Matomo (Piwik) -- deprecating
- Web and App custom analytics
- going to transfer to Google Analytics
- Heroku
- Used for Continuous Integration and Deployment of our applications and services
