Management at the Library

In addition to my current portfolio (user experience and support), I am now also responsible for coordinating what we refer to as IT production support for the entire Library. This involves coordinating the work of several teams to ensure that the IT infrastructure (everything from public and staff workstations to e-classroom technology to printers to software licenses to…) is running smoothly and effectively supports the staff and users of the Library.

More specifically, this will involve:

Coordinating the purchasing of hardware and software for all Library units
Reviewing inventory and supporting the budgeting for future IT needs
Acting as a liaison with branches and other library units to ensure their issues are being resolved and their IT needs are being met
Acting as a liaison with McGill IT to review support issues and act as a point person for any initiatives or projects involving the Library

Although it was only formally announced internally today, I’ve been working in this role in November. My first priority has been to dive into the backlog of issues and request and do whatever I can to move things forward. I’ve also been learning a lot about who does what and how things are done, and I’ve been using that understanding to start planning some new ways of working.

There is a lot of work to be done here, and I expect it will take a significant amount of my time until I can get new policies and workflows in place. Once that happens, not only will there be less friction involved in getting things done, but I’ll also have things organized to the point there I can hand part of the work off to other people on my team.

Although this work is far removed from my role as a academic librarian, the reality is that this is an area that has been neglected for quite some time and has a direct impact on both the productivity of our staff and, I guess you could say, the user experience of people using our facilities. It is also an area that I have some experience in and where I know that my efforts will provide real value to the Library. It isn’t going to be easy, and I’m going to have to prioritize and delegate some of my other work in order to make this work, but I believe that in the end it will be worth it.

I was poking around some analytics reports this morning and realized that it had been a while since I updated the browser stats for the web traffic on the Library’s web site. You can see the latest numbers in the table below.

Browser	Sept 2012	Sept 2013	Sept 2014	Sept 2015	Change
Internet Explorer	44%	38%	37%	32%	-12%
Firefox	22%	20%	14%	21%	-1%
Chrome	16%	23%	30%	27%	+11%
Safari	16%	18%	18%	19%	+3%

The general trend continues to be IE dropping off while Chrome gains. Firefox came back after taking a big dip in 2014, but at best to keeping even.

I thought I would add a second table to this report showing how the traffic from different device categories is evolving as well. I’m not sure if the counts are as meaningful for the earlier years, but here is what Google Analytics is reporting.

Device	Sept 2012	Sept 2013	Sept 2014	Sept 2015	Change
Desktop	97%	95%	92%	90%	-7%
Mobile	2%	4%	6%	7%	+5%
Tablet	1%	2%	2%	3%	+2%

Unsurprisingly, the majority of our traffic comes from desktop PCs, with mobile and tablet use slowly starting to climb. The rate of change may increase, though, now that our home page is finally responsive and does a much better job of displaying on mobile devices.

It is important to keep in mind that many of our patrons do not go through the Library web site to access our resources! Many will use Google/Google Scholar or will have WorldCat or their favorite databases bookmarked. Still, I think these numbers can give us a general idea of the browsers and devices being used my our patrons.

Edward Bilodeau, librarian for management and business at McGill

New responsibilities

Browser/device statistics for McGill Library – September 2015 update