Alma Early Adopters 4:Purdue University

Paul Bracke

We are "new early adopters" but have been very involved since then. We are a public university in Indiana and have 10 academic colleges/schools with strengths in engineering, agriculture and the sciences.

In the library, we have 12 subject libraries, archives and special collections. We have a small number of volumes, about 2.5M but with an emphasis on electronic journals.

Our current automation environment is fairly fractured.  Our ILS is Voyager, we don't have an ERM and that's a bit of a problem. We use SFX and Metalib for discovery. We are hoping to use Primo and metalib for discovery in the future.

When we were first approached by Ex Libris we reflected that we wanted better tools because of the fractured nature of our infrastructure and we wanted a better electronic resources management tool. We also wanted better analytics for decision support and a better collaborative approach. So the community zone in Alma was appealing. We also wanted a system for other types of collaboration, for example for shared print archives, resource sharing etc. Finally, it was a question of focus for us and to have a commitment. We have an ambitious plan for new programmes, esp. Research Data and Library Publishing.

If we compare our preparation to other universities, it is very similar. We had concerns about Primo, the task list functionality but there were things we wanted to do to make this a success for us. We wanted a structure for our staff for approaching the testing and a good communication with Ex Libris. We worked on the mental switch for our staff and had a lot of conversations internally. We adapted our workflows and identified our most important ones in order of priority in 2 levels: required to go live and not required but needed within 1 year. This did not include all our workflows.
Initially we had a Voyager speak but then it was translated to an Alma-speak.

We reflected on our objectives and the reason why we wanted to go live. Initially our communication was difficult with Ex Libris because we were talking in Voyager terms and their developpers were talking in Alma language. So that forced us to do the mental change: how do we describe what we do in Alma? It gave us a better opportunity to better understand and re-examine work practices. We had to work on a framework for training and support. Ex Libris can only go so far on how they can train our staff. We needed to provide more context to our staff so we have a few foundation training sessions for staff, including supervisors and the people needing the first line of support. Then we also trained acquisitions staff and other key members of staff.

So far I can say that our experience has been very positive.