Posts by Nabeela Jaffer

Academic library service portfolios are mostly a mix of big to small strategic initiatives and tactical projects. Systems developed in the past can become a durable bedrock of workflows and services around the library, remaining relevant and needed for five, ten, and sometimes as long as twenty years. There is, of course, never enough time and resources to do everything. The challenge faced by Library IT divisions is to balance the tension of sustaining these legacy systems while continuing to innovate and develop new services. The University of Michigan’s Library IT portfolio has legacy systems in need of ongoing maintenance and support, in addition to new projects and services that add to and expand the portfolio. We, at Michigan, worked on a process to balance the portfolio of services and projects for our Library IT division. We started working on the idea of developing a custom tool for our needs since all the other available tools are oriented towards corporate organizations and we needed a light-weight tool to support our process. We went through a complete planning process first on whiteboards and paper, then developed an open source tool called TRACC for helping us with portfolio management.

The Michigan Daily Digital Archives is a joint collaboration between the University of Michigan Library IT division, Michigan Daily, and the Bentley Historical Library. The Michigan Daily Digital Archives provides searchable access to over 300 volumes, 23,000 issues of digitized student newspaper, from 1891 through 2014. New volumes of the newspaper will be added in the future as they become available. The Library IT team developed a robust discovery interface for the archives. The team made the choice of building a discovery system instead of using an out of the box application or vended solutions. The development team followed Scrum-like Agile approach for website development.