Since 2024, Cornell Library IT has been setting aside a week each year dedicated solely to innovation and education. Innovation Week began because the Software Development teams work in sprints. With so many projects in the Library portfolio and so much work to be done, time was precious. The week has given Cornell Library IT a chance to come together across teams for personal and communal learning and problem-solving.

With no scheduled work, each staff member can devote significant time to projects of their choosing. Some tackle an existing problem, some learn something new, and others address longstanding to-dos.

Each year, Innovation Week culminates in a Show-n-Tell so that everyone can benefit from the experimentation and lessons learned. The 2026 projects ranged from early proofs of concept to a working connection supporting the university’s move from Tableau to Power BI. Across the demonstrations, staff focused on familiar problems: too many clicks, scattered information, and troubleshooting that takes time away from other work.

This Year's Highlights

Catching configuration drift: Stephen Githinji, Cloud Systems Administrator, demonstrated a workflow designed to catch configuration drift, which is the difference between infrastructure defined in Terraform code and live resources in Amazon Web Services. Using GitHub Actions, a scheduled nightly check would flag discrepancies and create a Jira ticket for review. In his demonstration, Githinji changed a tag on a test instance, detected the mismatch, and restored the expected value.

Easier DOI searching: A librarian approached Matt Connolly, Full Stack Applications Developer, with a request to make DOI (digital object identifier) searching easier. He created a prototype that shortens the path from a catalog search to an article’s full text.

Dark mode for Blacklight tools: Melissa Wallace, Web Developer, enabled an optional dark mode for the library’s Blacklight tools, including the Digital Collections Portal. Her test implementation detects a user’s operating system preference and offers a toggle for light, dark, or automatic display. September analytics helped show the potential audience: roughly one-third of users on the main library website use a system dark-mode setting.

Tableau to Power BI reporting: Sharon Markus, Senior Library Systems Analyst, described a collaboration that resolved a reporting challenge during the transition from Tableau to Power BI. Connecting the service to MetaDB, the library’s reporting database, required work with colleagues Jason Woodward, Paul Owens, and Joe Richardson, as well as vendor EBSCO. The team established a TLS-terminating proxy connection and addressed the additional requirements for publishing to Microsoft Fabric. Markus said the working solution offered security and limited setup and support overhead for individual publishers.

Catalog indexing stability: Frances Webb, Applications Developer, focused on a known issue: catalog indexing stability and mitigating database lock-ups. She described work on a script that would check Jenkins for jobs intended to run continuously and restart them when necessary. She also discussed longer-term work to reduce database contention caused by lengthy queries.

Investigating bot traffic: Soumitra Kayal, Senior DevOps Engineer, shared a proof of concept aimed at speeding investigations of traffic spikes caused by a surge in bot traffic. Using logs from September, his demonstration showed how an automated dashboard could collect data from different resources to help staff assess whether traffic came from bots or people.

A developer dashboard with AI search: Inspired by a large inter-institutional metadata project, Jeremy Duncan, Full Stack Applications Developer, created an AI dashboard to consolidate documentation and project tracking maintained in different tools in one place. His developer dashboard, built with open-source Docusaurus, brings documents, project status, and workspace tools together. It includes an “Ask the Docs” feature that lets users query the collected information through AI.

Closing the Week

At the end of the presentations, Philip Robinson, Assistant Director of IT, emphasized the value of creative solutions to address practical needs. The focus on making everyday work more efficient, stable, and expeditious was shared across projects. Library IT strives to innovate all the time, but this week gave the entire unit a chance to come together for experimentation, learning, and conceptualization. The impact of that time will last long after Innovation Week.

Written by Jesi Buell, Manager, Library Applications Development