By Amber Spratlin
On July 21, 2020, GALILEO Admin, a new local electronic resource management portal, will launch alongside the new GALILEO web portal. Mike White (GALILEO Support Analyst) and Russell Palmer (Assistant Director, GALILEO Support Services) hosted a webinar on July 7, 2020 to introduce librarians across the state to this new, one-stop shop interface for e-resource management.
The former portal, GALILEO Local Resources Integration (or GLRI), used a back-end system first launched in 2001. While GLRI functioned well for librarians for almost exactly 19 years, GALILEO recognized the need for an update.
In 2017, GALILEO released a Strategic Plan, which listed a goal to, “Create and maintain user-centered GALILEO environment(s) and interface(s) that are easy to use, customizable, personalized, powerful, and comprehensive in scope.” White says, ”To meet this goal, we were going to have to redesign the GALILEO portal from the ground up using modern web technologies. In order to support the new GALILEO portal, we also had to redesign the back-end of GALILEO using modern technologies.”
Because no existing platforms provided the range of functionality needed for this product, the GALILEO team began working to build their own platform over a year ago. Based on the existing knowledge of the software developers, GALILEO Admin was created using the Ruby on Rails programming language.
White notes that adding resources to GALILEO Admin will be a very different experience from GLRI:
“Librarians, especially those who have been using the current platform, will immediately notice a more user-friendly interface. Searching, filtering, and sorting also have greatly improved. It is also much easier to add institutional branding to your local resources. Managing resources has been streamlined by removing seldom-used fields. We also have added new functionality, such as featured resources, viewing institutional information such as IPs and contacts, and reporting. However, I believe the thing librarians will be most excited to hear is that changes in GALILEO Admin will update in GALILEO portal immediately! You no longer have to wait until the next day to see changes you’ve made.”
White also clarifies that while the GALILEO Admin portal is already much improved from the former GLRI portal, it is still a work in progress: “…we do not think of GALILEO Admin as being finished. We will be continually updating it and incorporating feedback we receive from librarians.”
Click here to view a recording of the GALILEO conference presentation on GALILEO Admin.
Training sessions (for both new and experienced users) will be held in late July and early August. Please fill out the Contact Form to let the team know that you would like to attend.
