Technical Seminar
I attended the Primo certification from May 2-3.
It was a basic Promo hands on training on the Primo front office and back office.
We learned how to hide a HTML element using CSS, how to upload a logo to Primo in front office.
In back office, we learned:
Eluna meeting
Ex Libris devoted Wednesday and Thursday mornings to their services and product updates. I learned from the updates that Ex Libris added a Knowledge Center and also a customer feedback page. Ex Libris is listening carefully what the customers’ request. New features were implemented because of the popular demands.
Ex Libris also has monthly release for Alma such as Community Zone is opened for editing bibliographic records for all customers, CZ will also be opened to contribution of electronic portfolios and collections.
In Primo, Ex Libris is working to combine the best features of Summon and Primo. A new Primo interface will be released in 2016.
We met with Veronica and Connie to discuss the functions of Functional Experts”, librarians who are experts in certain areas of Alma and are willing to help other libraries.
I attended the Q&A from Ex Libris. Is working hard to expose local collection via Primo & Summon, open web searching, export electronic holding to Google Scholar. One particular question that I also feel strongly about, is the reason why Ex Libris does not open the sandbox earlier for libraries that are going to migrate. The answer is Ex Libris thinks that it is not a good idea to do it without enough knowledge and guidance from Ex Libris.
I attended “Going softly into Alma” a session presented by a librarian from Valdosta State University. The content of the session does not match the title. It has nothing to do with migration.
I also attended some other meetings, they are either too advanced for me now, or the session does not live up to the wonderful titles.
In conclusion, the Technical Seminar is worth going. For the Eluna meeting, although Ex Libris did nothing but infomercials, but it gives us a sense where the company is heading, what new services they are going to provide and what new products they are working on.
Eluna Stats
1) Attendees
Total: 674
US attendance: 605
Canadian attendance: 36
2) About Eluna
Eluna has 325 members strong representing 1187 libraries
Alma
1) Marshall Breeding - January 31, 2016
Alma, designed for academic, research, and national libraries earned top rankings among large academic libraries for Overall Satisfaction, ILS functionality, Functionality for electronic resources and for company loyalty.
2) Facts
There are total of 400+ live institutions now across over 20 countries. 550 institutions will go live by January 2017.
402,000,000 bib records
3) Focus on (2016-2017)
Share Primo and Summon central content index
Digital resources: extend digital support, amazon cloud storage
Collaboration
o Central configuration
o Central acquisition of e-resources
o Sharing of rules (normalization, merge)
Analytics
o Link resolver usage & enhanced COUNTER and SUSHI
o KPIs (key performance indicator (KPI))
o Benchmark analytics
o Physical inventory
o e-inventory
o e-journals cost & usage
o Fulfillment data
o ILL data
o Funds expenditure
o Consortia analytics: Alma & Primo analytics capabilities
Alma & Primo combined reports
New subject area-journal usage
Consortia support
Metadata management
o Linked data API
o Enriched e-book metadata from PO
o Enhanced Dublin Core Support
Expanding global authority: Community zone contribution
Acquisitions
o Real-time acquisitions integration – Enhance PDA/DAA (Amazon integration)
Fulfillment:
o Document delivery platform – pick up and return anywhere, automated warehouse integration
Resource sharing
o ILLiad NCIP integration-consortia resource sharing
o Enhanced copyright management
New KnowledgeBase
Campus mobile solutions
o Alma mobile app for library staff in development, and will be released in August 2016
Enhanced copyright
Primo
Launch user experience and usability initiative: A new user experience (UX) is coming
o Visual design
o Most-used areas
o Screen layout data arrangement
o System-wide UI elements
o Focus on “repository search” area
o Redesigned top navigation bar
o Enhance “search and find”
Personalized ranking: moved to the front end, added date parameter
Resource type changes for consistency in facets and display
UI notification when expanding query – for expansion to full text in case of very few results
All the locations and requests in one sport
All the detail about one book in one page
o Citation trail: new exploration paths, it will be released in November 2016
Integration with teaching and learning tools
o Primo and Leganto integration
Instructor can search in Primo via the legato interface
Export to Leganto Primo eShelf content
Integration with researches tools
o Primo-RefWorks integration
Search in Primo via the RefWorks interface
Use RefWorks as central eShelf
Leganto
Leganto currently has 15 customers in seven countries
o Australia: 4
o Belgium: 1
o Canada: 1
o Israel: 1
o Italy: 2
o UK: 3
o USA: 2
Six live customers
o Kingston University, London being the first (September 2015)
o Feedback from pilot groups: extremely positive
Rosetta
Rosetta enables institutions to manage digital entities end to end-from submission to dissemination.
A rule-based workflow engine and open architecture allow institutions using the system to develop unique plug-in tools and other applications to enhance the system's ingest, management, preservation, and delivery processes.
Key Takeaways:
Key takeaways on data clean-up:
Key takeaways on migration:
Key takeaways on post-migration:
Ex Libris Global and North America Company Update
Corporate overview:
Ex Libris Next-Generation Library Services Update
Alma
Primo
Leganto/SIPX
Alma Product Update
CSCU Cross Institutional Training discussion
Ex Libris Strategy Update
Oren Beit-Arie, ExL
Suggestions for a Successful Alma Implementation
Janice Christopher, UConn
One Model to Rule them All? Provide your End Users with the Services They Need
A Bridge Over Troubled Water: Problem Management During Implementation
Alma Implementation at Western Kentucky University: Best Practices
ENUG Ex Libris Northeastern User's Group
Creating a Primo Toolkit for the Orbis Cascade Alliance
Multi-Institution Primo Sites: a Round-Table Discussion
ELUNA Consortia SIG
Closing Keynote - United we Stand, Divided we Fall: toward a unification strategy for the future of academic libraries.
Configuring Primo Record Display & Search
Way over my head. It is the first time I have ever seen (or even heard about) the “Primo Back-office” user-interface.
Troubleshooting Acquisitions Activities
Intro to Primo Analytics
Creating Sets, Running and Monitoring Jobs
Using Alma APIs
Alma-Primo Interoperability (for Consortia)
The ELUNA (Ex Libris Users North America) annual conference in Oklahoma City on May 4-6, 2016, was an enlightening event for me, as someone who is just starting to learn about the Ex Libris Alma/Primo library system, in preparation for our migration later this year. In the past I had attended many IUG (Innovative Users Group) conferences, the parallel user group for our current ILS, Millennium by Innovative Interfaces Inc. The 700 attendees were very friendly and welcoming to their user community. There are many experts in this group, and they will be a great resource as we move forward with our migration planning.
I attended a number of sessions by other consortium members using Alma/Primo. The most interesting were those presented by recently migrated systems, such as consortia in Wisconsin and Georgia. They offered tips and tricks on such things data clean-up, testing, staff training, and migration planning. I also attended a session of the “Consortia SIG” (special interests group), and E-NUG (Ex Libris Northeast Users Group), both smaller groups within ELUNA who interests and/or geography align with our consortium – more great contacts and resources.
There were also a variety of plenary sessions where we heard from high-level administrators from Ex Libris. They updated us on company mission and future plans, as well as the results of a recent merger with another large company, ProQuest. They talked about Ex Libris becoming a leader in the higher education technology market – perhaps branching out from just library automation products.
Other sessions I attended were quite technical – normalization rules for the Primo discovery interface, how to get the most out of the analytics reporting tool (including writing your own queries), and a work-around for the shelf inventory process as it exists in Alma (the back-end of the catalog). I can see that in future years, when we become more adept at using the Alma and Primo products, this conference and this community of users will be very valuable to us as staff users of the system.
Thank you to the BOR for the opportunity to attend. The knowledge gained is extremely valuable to me in my job, and by extension will benefit all 17 institutions (including our faculty, staff, and students) of our consortium as we move forward with implementing these products.
First day:
1. Managing Electronic Resources in Alma
2. Troubleshooting Electronic Resources in Alma
3. Creating Sets, Running and Monitoring Jobs in Alma
4. Restful APIs in Primo
Second day (whole day):
1. Hands-on Alma Workshop
The second day was definitely more valuable for me as it was basically an introductory training for new/prospective Alma users and went over the whole system and all of its basic functionalities. In the survey I filled in for Ex Libris, I mentioned that in the future they should schedule their sessions better – have the Hands-on sessions the first day and the more specialized sessions – the second.
The Restful APIs in Primo was very technical, high level, not for beginner users of Alma. The good news is that in the audience there were users from other libraries (where Alma is already fully implemented) who looked very involved and familiar with the topics, which makes me think that it is a question of accumulating more experience – at some point the users apparently become experts and can handle by themselves what they need to do.
The ‘Managing and Troubleshooting Electronic Resources in Alma’ and the ‘Creating sets and running jobs’ sessions gave me a general idea of how E-resources are managed and how jobs are run in Alma.
I would like to emphasize that I was impressed with Alma Analytics(demonstrated during the Hands-on Alma Workshop). I think it is a powerful tool to create all kind of reports, it is user friendly, i.e. does not require the user to have special knowledge in sql or any programming in order to create his/her own reports. Excellent tool.
During the hands-on session I also asked and confirmed for myself, that we will be able to handle the external users the way we want to: the user groups will be defined during the initial configuration, we can create then the groups we need in order to meet the specific needs of both, CCs and Universities, we can define a full list of user groups that includes everything, and each CC/University can use a subset of this list for their needs. I am thinking about all this in the light of creating the patron files (or other type of provisioning Alma with the external users) that will be extracted from Banner. Other thing I learned was that, in case the universities want to keep their ptype/pcode3 (from Millennium) which are currently generated based on the student Banner major code or faculty CoreCT job title, this info in Alma will go in the Statistical fields and can be used for reports and statistics. The loan rules will not be based on that, but on the User groups.