Alma Early Adopters 5: University of Manchester

Andy Land

Brief background information because the context is very important. If you don't know much about Manchester, you will know about the football side of things. It is primarily a city that is both united and divided by football! The university has got almost 40000 students and is very much about research. The library has over 4million books, manuscripts and archives and over 2.5 million items in the ILS. We have been with Talis since 1993. We had been with it for so long we needed to look at best value.

We had to review the library startegy: Support the reasearch and teaching, provide better access and discovery, improve methods of collection management. In terms of external context, there were also studies about LMS, esp. the JISC & SCONUL study (2008).

What we were looking for was a system that could meet the needs of our users and staff, value for money, improve system interoperability and partner with a company that understands the present and future needs of a large research library in a world class university.

We came to Alma because we found it would satisfy the majority of our requirements and represented value for money. We rationalised a lot of our current systems and it provides a lot of functionality. We hope to be able to take advantage of a number of API's. There is also a strong development network. We were drawn to Ex Libris client base. We feel that the clients that Ex Libris has enables us to pull our resources together and Ex Libris has a good record in innovation.

Our risks related to the fact that we're no longer a big fish in a small pond. Alma is a concept, not a product (at least at the time that we signed up). UK functionality is being developed and we haven't seen much of that yet. Primo is a sole interface (more later).

Initial benefits coming out of the procurement exercise include the cloud infrastructure. We were looking for environmental efficiencies around the IT services. It is allowing us to review our workflows and processes. One of the key thing is to try and simplify our circulation. We have 10 sites with different rules and we want to go down to the essentials. We hope to deliver new services and functionalities.

Our implementation project starts next month. Angela mentioned the Alma Academy. Our staff also show testing fatigue. We've been able to influence UK specific functionality and that was a positive experiences, as well as the shared experiences with other Early Adopters.

Issues for us is the switch to Primo as the main interface. That is a concern so we need to buy into Primo before we move to Alma. That is our biggest challenge over the next 2-3 months. There are also issues around missing information. We'd expect to see some information around our special collections for example, so we have plans of using some other solution. Staff also were suprised for example that there is no serials prediction patterns.

Finally data migration, especially coming from a non Ex Libris environment, will be challenging. We are still working on that, issues with historic and legacy data in particular, but so far our experience has been very good.