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From Classic to NDE: Upgrading Primo When nobody did it before you

Tue, 12 May 2026 14:21:06 -0400

I have now migrated a library discovery layer twice in two years. At my previous institution I finished an EBSCO Discovery Service update just before leaving. Then I arrived at my current job, assessed the environment, and realized that the Primo instance I’d inherited was still running Classic — not Primo VE, not NDE, but the original, pre-Angular, pre-modern-stack Primo that Ex Libris has been nudging libraries away from for years. Nobody had upgraded it because, until I arrived, there was no dedicated systems administrator to do it.

Who keeps the archive? Cultural heritage, forgotten writers, and the infrastructure behind recovery

Tue, 12 May 2026 13:54:06 -0400

A few years ago I co-created a digital archive. The Victorian Jewish Writers Project began as a scholarly problem: nineteenth-century Jewish writers in Britain had been systematically excluded from the literary canon, their work scattered across out-of-print volumes, digitized newspaper runs, and institutional collections that had no particular reason to surface them together. The project was an attempt to do something about that, to gather, describe, and make discoverable a body of writing that existing finding tools were not built to find.

What actually happens when you request an article

Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What Actually Happens When You Request an Article

You’re deep in a research rabbit hole. You find a citation that looks perfect, click the link, and instead of the article you get a paywall or a dead end. So you click “Request via Interlibrary Loan,” fill out a form, and wait. A day or two later the PDF lands in your inbox. Magic, right?

Not magic. Infrastructure.

I want to walk through what actually happens in that window between your click and your PDF, because it involves half a dozen systems talking to each other in ways that are genuinely interesting and almost entirely invisible to the people who depend on them every day.

Library as Infrastructure

Thu, 07 May 2026 15:09:20 -0400

Sometimes sysadmin work can seem relatively thankless–you can be three layers deep in a log file, tracing why a resource-sharing request silently failed at 2am, even while you realize that nobody noticed. That’s not because the service doesn’t matter, but because when infrastructure works, it’s invisible. When it breaks, it’s a crisis. Just as most of us don’t regularly think of the pipes carrying water in and out of home unless something goes awry, digital infrastructure is invisible to most people most of the time. To use a tired phrase, that’s a feature, not a bug.

About me

Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a library systems administrator at an academic research library. Before that, I was a literature professor. People sometimes find that combination surprising, but the more time I spend in both worlds, the more coherent it seems: both are fundamentally about organizing knowledge and making it findable. The methods are just very different.

On the technical side, my work lives at the intersection of library systems (Alma, Primo, ILLiad), Linux infrastructure, and the scripting and tooling that holds it all together. I spend a lot of time in terminals, writing Python and Go, debugging integrations between systems that were never quite designed to talk to each other, and thinking about why library infrastructure is so chronically under-documented.