Alma Early Adopters 3: University of Salford

Angela Walker

The University of Salford is part of the European Early Adopters, we aim to be going live in June 2013. We are not Ex Libris ILS (Talis) so that makes things a bit slowlier.

Information aobut Salford: we are neighbours to Manchester and work closely with our colleagues there. It is a small University, 3 colleges and 10 schools, our curriculum is very much based on employability.

The Library is based accross 4 sites and has 100 members of staff. We have 17000 e-journals and 300000 e-books and that's one of the reasons why we went down the Alma route.

We have had Talis since 1996. It is mostly aimed at print resources and is a complexe system. One of a big issues for us is the internal hosting of the system. The IT was moved away from the library as well as the system so we have no control. The University has a plan of creating a new IT infrastructure and the ILS is at the bottom of the list.

Because we have more and more electronic resources we need a better system. We are also interested in a cloud system and looking at future developments. The management information was becoming too complexe using different systems. We also wanted to reduce the total cost of ownership.

Why Alma? We had already been looking at Primo and wanted a next generation system. Now our students generally use Primo to search our resources. We had funding in place for a new LMS. We were initially looking at Aleph but then heard of new generations systems with better workflows so we held back a little bit. We wanted a better control of our system. Although Alma is in the cloud, it will be controlled by library staff.

Our staff are involved in circulation, acquisition, academic support and IT services, they help us for the testing. One of the big things for us is the management of historic data. We've looked at how we would go about the data migration. In the UK there is a lot of requirements for data security so we had to look at that as well, as well as RFID, our current processes and workflows, we expect we'll have to make huge changes to our policies and will need to give a good communication to our colleagues.

Preparing for Alma: We had to do some data clean up, stock check, review our workflows and prepare for data migration. Ex Libris contacted us recently and that made us realise there was a lot of preparation work. We had a kick off meeting last week so the preparation is in the early stages.

Our expectations are the we will have a better functionality, streamlined workflows, better reporting and metadata management, improved functionality in Primo, reduction in number of systems and better control. Although we've used Primo as our main search tool, users still need to go into the OPAC for requesting material.

We anticipate possible issues because we are aware it is a new system. Because we are coming from a non ex Libris system, the data migration may be more complicated. Alma is a very different way of working, for example, we don't talk of circulation but fulfilment! We are hopeful on a lot of new functionality. We have concerns how we will be able to collaborate with the IT services, as well as on system integration. We know from other early adopters that that can be a challenge, both from our end and Ex Libris' end.

Our experience so far has been very positive. The communication channel that we are using is a lot via webex. We are moving from a small UK based ILS to a big international one so the communication is different. The training for staff will be a big cultural change as it will be done via webex. The Alma Academy is maybe not happening in the US, we don't have a test system at this stage. It is a weekly event done via webex with Alma early adopters UK where we all sit down and discuss funtionalities and submit questions to Ex Libris.

In the future we're hoping to use most of the functionalities in Alma, bookings, online payments, intergration with our course management system and integration with the fincance system.

If you want to contact me feel free to send me an email to langley-walker@salford.ac.uk