Hi all,
Brandon and I were both out of the office since our last update two weeks ago, so neither of us have much to report. But I did want to provide a brief update on the project as well as describe an upcoming project related to ULMS.
Kick-off Meeting and Project Management Workshop
The Implementation Team, including Alice Kawakami, Rae Ann Stahl, and Patrick Newell, have been moving forward with Ex Libris on the planning of the Kick-off Meeting and Project Management Workshop on October 5-6 at the Chancellor’s Office. The agenda and logistics for that have been set, and we look forward to seeing all of the campus project managers in Long Beach!
Our HR department is also (slowly) moving forward with the hiring process on the Data Migration and Workflow positions, so we hope to have those completed in the next few weeks. Believe me when I say that we are all very eager to see those positions filled as soon as possible.
Early implementation of Primo Central with Xerxes
One other thing I wanted to bring to everyone’s attention is actually a project related to ULMS.
As part of our contract negotiations with Ex Libris, we secured early access to Primo Central at no additional cost to the CSU. Just to cover some of the terminology here: Primo is Ex Libris’ name for their overall discovery system. Primo Central is the name they give to the aggregated index of journal article content (and other research data). Primo (proper) indexes your local records (catalog and digital repositories like ContentDM, DSpace) and then, when a user performs a search, combines those results with Primo Central results in order to create a single set of search results.
Currently, we are using Summon as the source of article content within our own discovery system, which we call Xerxes. Our plan is to replace Summon with Primo Central over the course of this next academic year. For end-users (faculty, students, and reference and instruction librarians) this will be a seamless change. The Xerxes interface will not change, and the article results will look virtually identical to what they see now. They’ll just be coming from a different underlying search engine – Primo Central instead of Summon.
But the change will require some training and configuration on the back-end. Ex Libris is currently provisioning Primo Central instances for each campus (sans San Marcos and Sacramento, who already have this set-up), and will provide us access to documentation, training materials, and the administrative console for Primo Central once that is ready. At that point, I will set-up test instances of Xerxes for each campus on our dev/test server and connect those to their respective Primo Central instance. I’ll then work with the campuses to test this new set-up over the winter, with the goal of going live with Primo Central in Xerxes at the end of the Spring term.
So campuses have a good nine months to prepare for this change. Campuses can elect to switch earlier if they like (I’m looking at you, quarter system schools), and this does not, of course, impact Chico and San Jose who are not using Xerxes for discovery currently.
We’ll use Xerxes with Primo Central for the 2016-17 academic year, and then switch to using Primo with Primo Central once we go live with Alma in the early part of the summer of 2017.
This early access to Primo Central, then, gives us a jump start on becoming familiar with Primo Central. It also saves us a considerable amount of time and money, as we will not need to renew our Summon contract after this academic year, and will no longer need to maintain two separate knowledgebases (SFX and Serials Solutions). We’ll basically have a free discovery service for the 2016-17 academic year. We’ll be discussing with COLD how best to re-purpose those savings.
I’ll be setting up some webinars and distributing other information on this Xerxes Primo Central project in the coming months. So keep an eye out for that.
All -
A very happy Friday to all of you in the CSU Libraries! Today’s message contains updates and information about:
- Recap of Sept 10 Working Group Leads meeting
- Reminder: October 5-6 meeting for Project Managers
- The Vanguard Phase of the project
- ELUNA membership & new monthly Ex Libris webinar
- Reminders: sign up for Working Group listservs, project website, Alma documentation portal
NOTE: I will be on vacation from Monday, Sept 14-Friday, Sept 25. David and Alice will be here for all of your ULMS needs.
Leads Meeting recap
The Working Group Leads met at Dominguez Hills on Thursday, Sept 10 for an all-day kickoff and orientation session. The morning was spent discussing the role, responsibilities and expectations of the lead members and getting an overview of some technology tools they can use to organize discussions and manage information on behalf of their working groups, namely Collaborate and Confluence. After lunch, each group of leads broke out to select the chair of their team and discuss agendas and topics of interest to their working groups. Finally, each group shared their agenda and topics out to each other, capping off a very enjoyable and successful meeting!
You can find out more about your leads and other information about your Working Group on the project website: http://ulms.calstate.edu.
October 5-6: Project Kickoff
Campus Project Managers will be attending the official ULMS Project kickoff meeting on Monday, October 5 at the Chancellor’s Office in Long Beach. Ex Libris implementation team members will be in attendance to introduce themselves, discuss the project, Alma and Primo in more detail, and communicate timeline and deliverables to the CSU. Project Managers will be invited to attend a project management bootcamp on Tuesday, October 6, also at the Chancellor’s Office. Attendees can expect more details shortly.
Vanguard Phase
Following the October kickoff meeting, we will begin the Vanguard phase of the project. This phase, the first official milestone of the project, consists of loading records from three of our campuses into an Alma and Primo instance. The three campuses chosen to participate are Fresno, Northridge and San Jose.
The purpose of the Vanguard is for us to have a first look at the Network Zone, but we have asked that all campuses have access to the Vanguard instance to get a first look at Alma, Primo and the Network Zone.
The load will begin in November and be released to us in January 2016. The next phase of the project will involve all campuses and will begin in March 2016 with a campus implementation kickoff meeting.
The master timeline for the ULMS project is available on the project website at https://calstate.atlassian.net/wiki/display/ULMS/Master+Timeline
ELUNA & Ex Libris Support Corner webinars
Several campuses have asked about consortial ELUNA membership in order to get member registration pricing for the 2016 ELUNA conference in Oklahoma City. I’m happy to confirm that the Chancellor’s Office has a consortial membership in ELUNA already, so your institution will not need to get separate membership.
Ex Libris announced a new webinar series that may be of interest to some of you. Called “Support Corner”, these monthly meetings will "cover topics relevant to institutions like yours, who use our solutions. These include tips for working with support, exciting product and support services updates and product-specific open Q&A sessions to help make your Ex Libris experience even better.”
The first meeting is on the topic of “Working with the North America Support Team” and will be taking place on September 25 at 2pm EDT.
Please use the following link for more details and to register: www.exlibrisgroup.com/category/NASupportCorner
Reminders
- If you want to participate in discussions relating to your area(s) of interest in the ULMS, remember to subscribe to the Working Group lists. The Working Groups will ultimately help shape the configuration and usage of the ULMS through best practice creation and issue resolution recommendations so don’t be left out. You can click through the Working Group links at http://ulms.calstate.edu to find out how to subscribe to the lists
- Everyone currently has access to the Ex Libris Documentation portal, including available Alma and Primo documentation. The credentials are:
- Ex Libris Documentation
http://www.customercenter.exlibrisgroup.com/ - Username and password sent out over email