Happy New Year from GALILEO’s Director

Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a relaxing holiday break. Mine was filled with travel and family and perhaps a little too much good food!

As we get started on 2024, I thought I’d take just a moment to update everyone on a couple of strategic projects and our plans for the future.

FOLIO: We will kick off the implementation of the new library management system this spring, around the time of our annual GIL User Group Meeting.

New EBSCO EDS UI: Everyone except the USG and private higher-ed libraries are live on the new user interface. So far, we have received a lot of great feedback about the new interface.

OpenAthens: We’re working with the Department of Education to implement K-12 authentication, with plans to pilot at least one school this spring. If all goes well, we’ll implement OA for K-12 this summer.

Of course, we continue to improve the GALILEO search portal and content, as well! Much of our strategic planning is centered on that effort. Over the holiday break, we did a soft rollout of some new functionality that you may not have noticed.

Users can now choose to customize the way the GALILEO Bento boxes appear on their screen, and save that in the browser for future sessions. Click on the little “gear” icon in the Bento search to explore that new functionality.

We’ve also been gathering lots of feedback on your wishes for GALILEO. As you might expect, AI was the buzzword for 2023, and we’re definitely looking into that. If you took the GALILEO Annual Survey – thank you! – you also had an opportunity to rank what items were most important to you.

Although we cannot guarantee we will be able to do everything, we will be building all this feedback into our planning and reviewing it with the GALILEO Steering Committee. This is the second strategic plan we’ve done since I’ve been at GALILEO.

While our high-level mission remains the same, a LOT has changed over the past 7.5 years. I’m thrilled with all we’ve accomplished so far, and I look forward to starting 2024 with a new set of strategic initiatives!

– Lucy Harrison, GALILEO director