Speaker: Erin Thomas
The speaker is from a digital repository, so the workflow and needs may be different than your situation. Their collections are very old and spread out among several libraries, but are still highly relevant to current research. They have around 15 people who are involved in the process of maintaining the digital collection, and email got to be too inefficient to handle all of the problems.
The member libraries created the repository because they have content than needed to be shared. They started with the physical collections, and broke up the work of scanning among the holding libraries, attempting to eliminate duplications. Even so, they had some duplication, so they run de-duplication algorithms that check the citations. The Internet Archive is actually responsible for doing the scanning, once the library has determined if the quality of the original document is appropriate.
The low-cost model they are using does not produce preservation-level scans; they’re focusing on access. The user interface for a digital collection can be more difficult to browse than the physical collection, so libraries have to do more and different kinds of training and support.
This is great, but it caused more workflow problems than they expected. So, they looked at issue tracking problems. Their development staff already have access to Gemini, so they went with that.
The issues they receive can be assigned types and specific components for each problem. Some types already existed, and they were able to add more. The components were entirely customized. Tasks are tracked from beginning to end, and they can add notes, have multiple user responses, and look back at the history of related issues.
But, they needed a more flexible system that allowed them to drill-down to sub-issues, email v. no email, and a better user interface. There were many other options out there, so they did a needs assessment and an environmental scan. They developed a survey to ask the users (library staff) what they wanted, and hosted demos of options. And, in the end, Gemini was the best system available for what they needed.
