Meeting with Wade Guidry, chair of Orbis Cascade Systems Working Group

Owned by Lauren Magnuson (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Feb 23, 2016
3 min read

Date

Attendees

Recording

Goals

  • Learn from Orbis Cascade's experience with Alma implementation

Notes

  • How did you reach out to the smaller institutions, particularly those that may not have systems librarians / robust IT support?
    • Every institution had to assign a systems contact to be responsible for getting things done for their institution.  For big milestones like data loading, authentication, each institution had 1-2 calls directly with Ex Libris to hash out issues.  Patron loading was another big issue.
  • Patron Loading
    • How did multiple institutions handle different patron expiration dates?
      • Each institution set policies for patron expiration dates.
      • Only shared fulfillment policies involve Resource Sharing.
    • Common user groups? No.  Would be a good idea.
    • Patron Information Privacy Policy document that defines patron information sharing between institutions.
    • Possibility to inherit a patron record from another institution to quickly lend to another Orbis patron.
    • Institutions load patrons on differing schedules
    • Mix of patron data sources (Banner, PeopleSoft, etc.)
  • Authentication 
    • A pain point.  Mix of authentication mechanisms used across Orbis (Shib, LDAP, CAS).  Start coordinating with Campus IT early for Authentication and Patron loading.
    • Theoretically would be nice to have one EZProxy for all institutions.
  • Network-level analytics – Orbis isn’t yet generating a lot of reports at Network level.  Only place where patron information is fully shared.
  • Data Prep: Technical services took lead on data extraction.  If data needed manipulation, Systems Group helped out.  Systems Group also helped out with fulfillment data and authentication.  Limitations on create list size required re-running jobs multiple times.

Communication

  • Open Calls with Systems staff across the Alliance every couple of weeks with members of current cohort.
  • Mailing Lists by functional area
  • Acquisitions and Electronic Resources sometimes not as organized/fall between the cracks.  Some overlap in these areas with systems.
  • Collaborated through calls among chairs of the teams.  Separate calls would be held among just chairs and with Ex Libris.
  • What kind of Primo customizations did you work on?
    • Discovery Team and a Delivery Team (now combined)
    • Did informal information sharing about Primo customizations.  No formal standards – institutions can do what they want in their Primo view.
    • Coordinated in presentation of resource sharing links (required to display Alma Resource Sharing (Summit).
    • Suggestion to have a single Primo instance to apply to all institutions rather than managing 37 separate Primo back-offices.  Different views can be created with a single Primo instance, use scopes to separate institutional holdings.  (note: this is likely what we already have set up)
  • Normalization Rules
    • Working Group for Normalization Rules that lives under Technical Services.
    • Display settings can be adjusted by institution, but normalization rules – even for local fields – must be applied the same way across the consortium.  Institution-specific normalization rules would be created for local digital repositories (e.g., ContentDM / OAI Gateways)
  • What projects took more time that you anticipated?
  • P2E is a challenge.  Suggestion if electronic serials are loaded in the ILS but plan on activating from the Community Zone in Alma, don’t migrate those records from ILS and activate separately once in Alma.  Clean your data before you migrate it (dump patron records, etc.).  Let go of missing and lost item records.
  • “Print to Email”. 
    • Printing is confusing, but became a non-issue
    • UW did local development to route print jobs for Acquisitions Workflow
      • Needed to get around Alma default of jobs going to a single printer.  Needed jobs to go to multiple printers
  • Automated Acquisitions workflows with GOBI