Discovery and ACcess Services (DACS)

Responsibilities

The team is responsible for the discovery systems, web sites, business applications and data management for the Library. We all work remotely at least two days per week. We have daily check-ins to stay connected, with a longer check-in to plan our work for the week. We also have regular standing check-ins with stakeholders throughout the library.

The team collaborates closely with the three staff members who manage our Alma platform to support the integrations (indexing, availability, requesting) within the Library Catalog, as well as supporting the code that facilitates the movement data in and out of Alma related to patron and financial information.

The team collaborates closely with the Ops team.

Technology

The team works on many applications utilizing Ruby, Rails, Drupal, Solr, and some legacy applications that we are working to phase out. We have been developing any new applications in Ruby or Rails. We also utilize Ansible for spinning up our infrastructure.

High Visibility Projects:

The Library Catalog supports access to bibliographic material that the library owns or has access to. We made many updates during the start of the pandemic to allow the Princeton users access to materials that the Princeton Library owns without needing to be physically present; For example Controlled Digital Lending (CDL), which allows students access to online copies of physical material for their classes.

We have Drupal websites that allow content editors and Librarians to post new information for the library users and also serve as the primary access point to Library services and subscription electronic resources. These sites range from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10. These include the Library website.

In addition we support many websites that utilize various technologies.

Team Github Projects

  • @discovery-and-access
  • @discovery-and-access-github
  • @alma-dacs (for collaboration with the Alma team)
  • @catalog-circulation-holding-request (for collaboration with the circulation stakeholders)
  • @catalog (general discussion on catalog issues)
  • @orangelight (technical discussion on catalog issues)
  • @irmwg-discuss (collaboration with the Inclusive and Reparative Metadata Working Group (IRMWG))
  • @website-and-libapps-tech (collaboration for drupal and springshare)

Team Google Drive

Reporting Structure

Kevin Reiss is the supervisor of the team. We are one of three development teams in Library IT Reporting to Esmé Cowles. The other two teams are:

Running this handbook locally 

asdf install
bundle install
bundle exec jekyll serve

Deploying the handbook

Github actions automatically deploys the main branch of this handbook whenever the main branch changes.

If you want to test out deployment without merging to main, you can:

  1. Fork this repo
  2. Make sure github pages is enabled in your fork
  3. Push your changes to the main of your fork