Larisa’s role is one of maintenance – it’s steady day to day and doesn’t really have a particular busy season. She helps maintain catalogue records to ensure the resources we have are as discoverable as possible through a variety of tasks like updating authority records (records that are the authoritative name for certain catalogue entries, like subjects, and personal names), cataloguing eBooks, and ensuring accurate and unique call numbers for materials. She works closely with other cataloguers, print resource maintenance staff (such as Janet Bender), and the eResources team (Courtney Bremer and Farzaneh Keramati) to make this happen.
Larisa enjoys the parts of her work that present puzzles, and this is part of what pushes her to find automated ways to do her work, and to help others find ways to automate theirs. Larisa has worked with the Collections Maintenance and Collection Development teams on work requiring automation and looks forward to these kinds of challenges.
The move to Alma has presented some challenges – where Larisa used to be able to have more control over authority records, in Alma Ex Libris maintains them. This means that we need to pay more attention to the automatic updates they do that may erase previous work and/or make records contain the wrong information. Alma processes and documentation have also introduced new issues, for example where in the past Larisa could normalize records in an automated fashion, that kind of process can now only be done with various levels of permissions, and it's sometimes unclear based on the documentation who is allowed to do what.
Something you should know about Larisa's role
Larisa wants to spend more time helping others automate the things in their jobs that can be automated. She says, “if you have tedious job to do and you are not happy about it, if you have to repeat the same basic actions again and again and you feel like you’ll fall asleep, if you're afraid of making mistake because your work is robotic, hitting the same keys thousands of times – let me know, I may be able to help.” Larisa regularly looks for ways that she can automate parts of her work. The more tedious elements of her role have inspired her to investigate ways to automate.
Larisa is currently working on:
Larisa has been exploring using Alma jobs and analytics to make batch edits to catalogue records. She’s also been helping by writing basic queries of the SQL database that our Voyager data sits on. Because she knows how the catalogue works and how catalogue data is structured it can be easier for her to write queries to expose that data.
How you can help Larisa out
If you have a question or something you’d like to explore with Larisa you should show her exactly what your process is. This way it’s easier to translate from human to machine. It’s also important to have patience with the process. These kinds of automations take lots of testing and iterations and there are no magic solutions!
Something fun about Larisa
Sometimes Larisa’s love for automation gets her in trouble, she reports “Recently I had to peel and replace 20+ spine labels from already shelved books because I simply forgot to run my perfectly designed Alma job.” On a more personal note, Larisa started to sew over the pandemic. She needed to find something away from the screen! She’s finding joy in exploring this new skill.
