Everything is Different: Easing the Pain of a Resource Transition
Speaker: Heather Greer Klein, NC Live
They license content as a core collection for all libraries on three year cycles, and have been doing this for the past 15 years. They also provide consultations, help desk, vendor liaisons, usage statistics, and other services.
They’ve had a 5.7% decrease in funding for materials over the past six years. There was a million dollar gap this year between their funding and the cost of existing licensed resources. The resource advisory committee evaluated the situation and came to the conclusion that they would need to change the main aggregator database for the first time in a decade. The NC Live staff had to make this transition as smoothly as possible.
They needed to get the change leaders on board. The advisory committee talked with everyone in ways that the NC Live staff could do. They also needed to give as much lead time as possible, and were able to negotiate a six month overlap between the two. The communication, however, should have begun well before the decision was made. They should have talked about the funding situation well in advance, and some were taken by surprise.
Transparency reduces anxiety and helps build confidence. They announced the change well before the transition process was outlined. They sent weekly updates with what was happening. But they needed a better plan for reaching frontline staff.
Communicate with patrons early and often, and they used the website with a splash page to do that. They feel like they could have done more, and the libraries needed more support to translate the information to their users.
Partner with the vendors. The new vendors did a lot of outreach and training.
Serials Renewal Cycle – Doing it the SMU (a Different U) Way!
Speaker: Heng Kai Leong, Singapore Management University
They have been around for 15 years. The library was recently renovated, and they are primarily electronic and have more electronic collections than print. Most of their journals are from aggregators or big deals, the rest are through two subscription agents.
They had a staff member assigned to each of the agents for the ordering, claiming, receiving, binding, and other processes. Each year they did a collection evaluation review.
Now, they only do the evaluation every two years. The off year is when they evaluate the agents, going with the one that is the best costs savings. This has freed up staff time to do more to support the users. They are now using only one agent for two year terms.
They have a service level agreement from the agent to document the services and products they offer to the library. It’s also helpful for the staff handling the serials so they know what should be done by the agent. It required some negotiation with the agent. When they do the evaluation every two years, they require the agent to send the SLA terms in a template that allows for easy comparison. The quote must be in Excel (not PDF). There is an example of the content of the template in the slides.
Migrating to Intota – Updates and Dispatches from the Front
Speaker: Dani Roach, University of St. Thomas
They are in the middle of the implementation of the library services platform from ProQuest. CLIC is an eight member consortia in St. Paul, MN. They’ve had a shared ILS for a number of years, and when that contract ended. They began looking at things in 2013, and at that point they decided to get a NextGen ILS.
The two systems available at the time weren’t quite what they wanted, and the demo of Intota happened after. Due to unknown factors, one of the consortia members pulled out and selected one of the other two systems at that time. At the end of 2013, Intota was selected by the CLIC board. An implementation team was formed, and contract negotiations were completed December 31, 2013. CLIC was the first academic consortia to subscribe.
Some libraries were long-time SerialsSolultions customers; others had little or no discovery layer. The phase one implementation was setting up Summon for the consortia. The consortial implementation was a whole new creature from a single-site implementation. There were many choices that had to be made early on which had significant (and often unknown) impact further down the road. This implementation was completed by June 2014, with continue revisions of how catalog data was ingested through January 2015.
Meanwhile, in July 2014 they began implementing the Assessment portion. Part of this involved mapping data from the ILS.
Ongoing has been the implementation of the knowledgebase/ERM. Each library needed to have all of their content in there. The new interface was made live in July 2014, bugs and all. Some new features are great, some old features are missed.
Next: acquisitions (including DDA), description (cataloging), and fulfillment (circulation). No plans yet for when those will begin.
The time it takes to do this is challenging because you still have to do your day to day work. Documenting the problems and fixes takes a lot of time. Keeping track of bugs and things is frustrating.
We want vendors to succeed because we want a variety of options. We need to be involved at the development level if we want that to happen.
