Collaborating at scale to improve user experience
The US state of Georgia’s virtual library, GALILEO, aims to help all Georgians meet their learning needs from kindergarten right through their lives. That means providing information to around eleven million service users via 400+ unique search portal sites – a huge undertaking with continuous improvements to user experience at its heart.
In 2017, a key element of GALILEO’s new strategic plan was to address stakeholders’ requests to ‘make authentication better’. For the last five years OpenAthens has been a partner in meeting that need – and, says Russell Palmer, assistant director, GALILEO Support Services, “with OpenAthens we’re making good progress”.
In “aiming to reach every audience and reach it well” there will always be setbacks, he acknowledges. Frustrating as they can be, GALILEO treats them as good opportunities to learn and they’re working collaboratively with us and other partners to keep making the path to knowledge easier.
Technical challenges
GALILEO has long been committed to federated solutions as the future of authentication, but Russell says content providers can sometimes create challenges. They can make changes that derail authentication and even take services offline until the issue is resolved. Changes and updates will always be necessary, but GALILEO wants disruption kept to a minimum. OpenAthens helps to address that.
“The OpenAthens Listserv service is a big step forward,” says Russell. The listserv fosters close discussion and partnership between colleagues, partners and experts to identify and resolve issues efficiently. It helps to keep information flowing to the end users who need it.
It’s also still the case that some providers (often smaller vendors of niche content) can’t support any type off offsite access. Their numbers are shrinking but in the meantime GALILEO, OpenAthens and other partners advocate for change. One way to do that is to highlight the benefits in terms of tracking content misuse. GALILEO has been working with us to trial our Reporting API tool and highlight its enhanced potential for tracking content use and misuse. The tool also enables customers to make data-driven decisions. Russell says GALILEO now plans to adopt Reporting API at scale.
As you might expect in such a complex operating environment systems interoperability is a persistent challenge, but things are being streamlined steadily. Through advocacy and education, libraries are being helped with troubleshooting and local SSL certificates are being updated in a more timely way. Russell says GALILEO has further plans to support local customizations:
“We want to leverage the power of OpenAthens, especially as it concerns things like attributes and the work we can do there with collection development or with setting up permission sets.”
Celebrating user experience wins
The reason for all this work, of course, is to improve user experience, year on year. For this reason GALILEO has staff teams focused on accessibility and usability, and invests in team training on user experience for its developers. For several years the organization has participated in judging our annual UX Awards. The awards promote the benefits – for service users, libraries and content providers – of making user experience a priority. Russell says:
“With OpenAthens we can do so much more of our work at scale, much more easily. Activating resources is so simple now.”
Towards the ‘holy grail’
GALILEO’s focus on ways to improve user experience remains sharp and they have several UX projects in hand. For example, they are working with open source library services platform FOLIO and resource-sharing initiative OpenRS to develop intra- and inter-library loan services. They are also exploring how AI can improve services and leveraging single sign-on to develop more personalization.
Excitingly, says Russell, GALILEO is making bold steps towards its ‘holy grail’: managing multiple affiliations effectively. This will mean “people who belong to an institution and a public library and have a child in K-12 education can access content more easily through a single authentication point.”
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