libtics.org

What is it?

The project, libtics.org, began as an enquiry from the University of Leeds, via Ex Libris, about providing some training materials for internal use. Leeds were interested in developing analytics capability within the institution, having recently (in 2019) become users of Alma.

The project started in early 2020, just as the pandemic was picking up momentum. The current work has now mostly finished. Leeds wanted a comprehensive introduction to working with Alma Analytics. In agreement with them, I developed a set of materials.

I always had in mind that perhaps this material may be reusable and useful more widely. I would like the material to be open source. From the start a set of tools was chosen that would make it easier to generate multiple output formats including the libtics.org website. The material is written in asciidoc markup and outputs are generated using asciidoctor and antora.

So, libtics is a resource for library professionals using Ex Libris products and who need to start getting to grips with Analytics at their institutions. Possible areas of extension might be into other library systems analytics offering, library analytics in general, more general stuff on the process of developing analytics, best practices, statistics, etc.

I hope that libtics can be a platform for the future development and maintenance of this type of training content.

The initial set of material at Ex Libris Analytics covers:

  • Introduction

  • Using analytics in practice

  • Understanding your data

  • In more depth

  • Dashboards

  • Reusing components

  • Format, style, charting

  • Primo analytics

  • Oracle Data Visualization — the new analytics component since October 2020.

Next up will be:

  • Some Leganto

  • Extraction/Export/APIs

  • More examples, especially to do with e-resources and workflow

  • In greater depth on some topics.

What it isn’t.

This is not an alternative to IGeLUs Analytics community of practice (previously the SIWG). The first resource here at libtic.org provides Ex Libris analytics training, perhaps complimentary to that mission.

Why is libtics.org different to other resources?

There are plenty of available resources on the InterWebs, notably by larger institutions around the time they were implementing Alma. Why try to do it this way?

  • Community based open project, not by a single institution — Built by the users of Ex Libris products to satisfy their and their institutions requirements for analytics training materials.

  • Developed like code — training materials developed as code. Meaning that all you need is a text editor, the development environment, and maybe something to record video, to develop content for libtics.org. Then your material, the code, is version controlled, committed to the repository with a commit message. A set of continuous integration processing pipelines can be activated locally for development, or remotely for deployment. Content is deployed on a leading static content delivery network, netlify.com. Algolia search is integrated using a Netlify add-on.

  • Tooling — a text editor of your choice, asciidoc, asciidoctor, antora, git version control, GitLab, are all freely available. Code is written in the asciidoc markup format and stored in plain text files. This can be used to generate the entire libtics.org website (or even book ready PDF) by processing with asciidoctor and antora. No proprietary tools needed. Though, I have been using Screencastify to record and edit screencast video.

  • GitLab — The code repository is GitLab with built in tools for project management and issue tracking and the ability to create manage and merge different functional branches of development.

  • Maintainability — Training materials deteriorate over time. Alma, Primo and their analytics packages change over time so that the functionality, and it’s description in the training materials drift apart. If libtics is maintainable then a good, correct match between the materials and the services it is describing is easier to achieve. The tool chain and GitLab help provide for that maintainability. Of course, a good community of people will still be needed to perform the actual maintenance and development using those facilities.

  • Zulip — chat at https://libtics.zulipchat.com. Very nice chat/forum tool.