A short list of applications that I’ve found useful in 2023.

A short list of applications that I’ve found useful in 2022.

A fresh set of challenges and new opportunities to serve Ohio’s public libraries

A few photos from the 2022 ALAO Conference at the Nationwide Conference Center

Soft aspirations for the new year

While contactless library services have been available for decades, there’s been a distinct shift in the design of and expectations from contactless services in the last few years. Whether accelerated by the pandemic, or by the expansion of contactless services in adjacent industries, there’s an increasing demand for simplicity and convenience of library services. A smooth user experience on the surface often involves complex behind-the-scenes procedures, requiring a depth of technical knowledge, cross-organizational communication skills, and a high level of patience and understanding as the process for creating new service models that remove barriers to accessing library resources can be burdensome.

Rather than fussing with the overhead and time investment required to maintain a suite of custom scripts to gain deeper insight into EZproxy usage, take advantage of the cumulative efforts of EZproxy users from around the world. In this presentation, the presenter will demonstrate the use of ezPAARSE, an open-source application for ingesting, parsing, deduplicating, and enriching EZproxy log files for standardized analysis. Attendees will leave with an understanding of the utility of ezPAARSE and the knowledge required to begin using ezPAARSE to extract a more rich and finer-grained set of insights from usage activity.

Contextualizing EZproxy is a presentation to the OhioLINK membership, primarily Ohio’s academic libraries. The presentation focuses on the challenge of troubleshooting EZproxy issues, as we need to consider the wide range of potential failures that are possible at each stage in the remote access workflow.