… features and improvements! In the last quarter of 2021 we have been busy as bees, preparing to kick off the 2022 with some big news. Read further to know about the details!

CDS Videos – videos.cern.ch 🎬

Following our plan for the Q4, we have introduced significant changes to the CDS Videos platform. You might not see it at the first glance, but the platform evolved “under the hood”.

Transcoding infrastructure and video processing 📺

Transcoding is one of the steps of the video processing performed after you upload your video file to the platform. The transcoding software is responsible for creating several predefined subformats for your video. These subformats are later used to provide improved streaming experience for anyone who is watching your video (after it is published).

The transcoding software previously used by CDS Videos was causing us and CERN users many headaches. Thanks to the collaboration with the CERN Webcast team, who provided the new video transcoding tool OpenCast as a service, we have worked very hard to integrate it. This new software is expected to have increased reliability and incomparable better performance.

We also took a good look into the rest of video processing steps and fixed the commonly reported issues. The processing will be now faster and more consistent – no more videos processing indefinitely in your “Upload” interface! 🎉

User experience tweaks

Last but not least, we have made a few improvements in the user interface, having in mind all the feedback we received from you. A few highlights:

• We have reworked some explanation text to improve general understanding.

• The authors and e-groups autocomplete has been improved, giving you access to powerful and more reliable users search – as broad as the CERN Phonebook!
• The user and e-groups videos restrictions is now case-insensitive.
• No more weird errors when publishing videos!

CERN Library Catalogue – catalogue.library.cern 📚

And what about the other applications? We worked on them as well!

CERN Library Catalogue’s latest version offers improvements in the user interface as well as librarian’s interface. We follow the latest standards on application security and data privacy, and as a result, we now provide user’s accounts and data anonymization. You can check details of our privacy policy here.

To make things easier, the identifiers in the book’s details page are now clickable.

Are you doing a lot of research? Are you in a dire need of articles and periodicals? Check the remodeled “Where to find” section of the periodical page.

Librarians’ tools

Our team has also worked on improving the librarians’ catalogue management tools. For example:

• Better bulk import of e-books
• Better export of catalogue’s object to CSV files
• Search tweaks – case-insensitive searches and other

Web infrastructure upgrade 💻

Among of the many changes and enhancements, we had to upgrade the underlying web infrastructure for both services CDS Videos and CERN Library Catalogue.

Both platforms are now hosted on OKD4 cluster provided by our colleagues from Web Infrastructure team. The migration is a good news not only for our users, but also for our developers: the change helps us decrease the effort we have to make to maintain and deploy new code.

CERN Document Server – cds.cern.ch 📄

The last, but not least – CDS. Our biggest and oldest application is under heavy assessment process – we are reviving its features and conducting interviews with the main users to understand how you are using our services, and how we can evolve in the future.

What’s next?

In the first quarter, the whole team is joining the effort of developing InvenioRDM, which will be the foundation of the future CDS.