Project update 09/27/15

Created by David Walker
Last updated: May 24, 2018
3 min read

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.