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The Boston campus stands on the site of the first World Series, held in 1903. Tickets were

$.50

About Northeastern

Snell Library

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• Most of collection budget spent on

electronic

• Distance education & satellite campuses

growing

• Campus legal very risk-averse

Our Systems Before Alma

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• III Millennium ILS & ERM (Oracle)

• TDNet TOUResolver & KnowledgeBase

• EBSCO Discovery Service

• III Millennium Web OPAC

Why Alma?• Our previous system was based on the management

of print resources

• Library staff spend time doing more and more duplicate work

• Inability to easily extract critical management information and reports from the system

• Previous system was a closed system and the Library is severely hampered by not being able to access its own data and use it in new, innovative ways

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Why Alma?• Alma is a “web-scale” library management system that

facilitates collaboration with other libraries

• We really like the idea of sharing community metadata

• Northeastern would not need to purchase or maintain local hardware and servers for the cloud-based system

• Interoperability with other Northeastern and vendor systems

• Alma is designed to support new models of acquisitions, including e-preferred, patron-driven, etc

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Why Alma?• Alma will offer significant management

information and reporting as a standard module, including usage information, cost per use.

• We would like to be able to report statistical information to ACRL and others in a more efficient manner

• There was a strong financial incentive as early adopters as well as oppourtunity to shape the product development

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Implementation Milestones• Project start: October, 2012

• First data extract: January, 2013

• Functional workshop: February, 2013

• Analytics training: March, 2013

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Implementation Milestones• Revised acq data extract: April,

2013

• Final data extract: June, 2013

• Go-live: July, 2013

• Certification training: July, 2013

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Challenging Implementation • Missing context in WebEx training

• O Alma expertise, where art thou?

• More onsite visits please!

• Missing and developing data migration docs

• Project management plans

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Challenging Implementation • Please, please, please let me get what I

want: access to configurations before go-live

• Tough migration process from non-EXL products

• 3rd Party integrations a moving target

• Certifiably… certified?

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Two months live…• Optimistic about the future of Alma

• Still excited about URM model

• Happy to have hot fixes and monthly release cycle

• Forces us to look at workflows

• Already impressed with Analytics and see potential for it to be even more powerful

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Two months live…Disappointed by the state of e-resource management

– Uresolver: lots of customization needed

– Knowledge Base: not the same as SFX?

– Portfolio management: difficult and time

consuming

– Licensing: missing stability and flexibility

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Two months live…• Resource Management challenges

– Metadata editor is still slow and awkward

– Big sets & global updates are still difficult

for us

– No workflows have been improved…yet

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Two months live…• Missing flexibility & customization

options

– User roles and permissions

– Order records

– Licensing

– Notices

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Two months live…• UI & UX needs improvement

– Not intuitive

– Course reserves & other core workflows

clunky

– Portfolio editor awkward

– Metadata editor

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Two months live…• But we are still VERY optimistic!

• Convinced that Alma is the future

• Excited about partnering with ExL to improve it

• Eager to see more sites go live and build a strong community

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