In September 2022, we have changed the integration from the old CERN SSO login to the new one. This was not only needed in relation to the upcoming decommissioning of the old SSO, but it also brings more security (enabling for example Two-Factor Authentication), more performance and more login possibilities. The recurrent login issues with external accounts are also solved.
In the coming weeks, we will also work to perform the same migration on CDS Videos.
InvenioRDM v10
We have now released InvenioRDM v10. Why is this important? Well, simply because it will be the base and the core software of the future CDS platform!
InvenioRDM v10 comes with support for custom metadata (necessary to store CERN specific fields, such as report number, experiments, accelerators, etc.), a new administration panel to make it easy to manage the instance and support for the new search engine OpenSearch. The latter will be necessary to comply with the standard CERN IT infrastructure.
In this last part of the year, the team will focus on creating a showcase version of the new CDS website, including a new look and feel and automatic deployments. This demo website will be useful to demonstrate features, test user experience and perform dry-run data migration from the current CDS to the new one in an iterative and progressive manner, to make sure that migrated data is correct.
CERN Library Catalogue
During the summer, we have made a bunch of improvements and bug fixes to the CERN Library Catalogue as well! To mention a few, book covers are now beautifully aligned and styled and the search for periodical and serial volumes now shows search tips.
In the context of InvenioILS, we also made it easier to create your own library catalogue website: with a couple of commands, users can set up a new instance and have a running website in a few minutes!
… 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 📺
Video upload processing view
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.
Project editor’s permissions panel
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.
Book page with external provider hyperlinks
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.
Periodical page featuring physical volumes
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.
This autumn 2021 has come along with a bunch of new features! 🎉 The team has worked hard, mainly improving the user experience of the CERN Library Catalogue website.
Below, a summary of what has been achieved.
Extend multiple loans at once
With a click of a button, you can now extend all your loans at once, a useful feature if you have many books on loan at the same time. In your profile page, you will find a new button “Extend all loans” in the top-right corner when you have at least one ongoing loan.
Note that the extension of ongoing loans is available only for the eligible loans.
“Where to find” section
The “Where to find” section in the book details page has been redesigned to make it easier to find available copies of the book at the library.
Other goodies
🔍 The search engine has been tuned to improve search results when searching for standards ISO numbers with dashes “-“. For example, you can now search for “ISO-8528” or “ISO 8528” and find relevant results in both cases.
📨 We have reworked how e-mails are sent. The website now allows the integration of other notifications systems, and it is ready to be used with the new CERN Notifications app. We have also reduced the number of sent e-mails so that we don’t spam your mailbox.
📖 We have improved the search guide by adding more examples and correcting some wrong search queries.
Back-office: importing new literature
Librarians at CERN have now an easier way to import new literature in the platform:
Librarians can now immediately see the number of imported literature and filter them by import status.
Librarians can use the new search box to find imported literature.
Next steps
Our efforts will be still focused until the end of the year on improving the CERN Library Catalogue website and, at the same time, on developing a more reliable way of uploading and publishing videos on CDS Videos.
The CDS team has worked very hard to build the new Library Catalogue website and it is now live (released on April 2021). The website has been built in close collaboration with the CERN Library team but also with RERO, a competence and service centre for libraries in Switzerland.
The website contains all books, e-books, journals and standards available at CERN and allows CERN users to loan physical copies or access digital versions of such literature. The content that was previously available in CDS has been migrated to the new platform.
The new CERN Library Catalogue website is an Integrated Library System (ILS) software: while building the solution for CERN, the CDS team has created a reusable, open source, generic platform InvenioILS that can be used by other organization in the world, based on the open source digital repositories framework Invenio.
