Alma Early Adopters1: Boston University

Diane Aydon?,  Boston University

In my 10 minutes I will try to tell you about our implementation and what it-s like in my department.

Our implementation was not typical, we had been inside Alma for at least 2 years, testing features, giving feedback, looking at our data. At various stages our data was migrated so the migration was in various stages and we were looking at the various functionalities so it was different each time.
Migrations was our greatest challenge and especially for electronic resources because it was coming from our home-grown system. And Alma was still in development. Each time there was a new release of Alma with new functionalities. This requires a great amount of flexibility. So this has been our implementation, an ongoing period of using and testing and watching what was changing.

Pros:
We had a great deal of infuluence on Alma development. We had internal training so a lot of inhouse expertise, we knew what was coming and had a lot of support from Ex Libris, especially when we went live. Our experience changed when we went live, because you are dealing with your regular workflows and you learn things very quickly which you couldn't anticipate.

Cons
We made mistakes and discovered bugs. We were inside so we didn-t have too much time to think through processes. Some of the functionality came late. We are somehow jealous of other ealy adopters, we were lonely because we were the first. We had to focus on our institutions but couldn't see the whole of Alma like others and think through the strategies, prepare our steps and users etc. so it's been a balancing act for us.

My words of wisdom
- Be ruthless! It will be easier to configure Alma is you have a simple structure. We used Aleph because we could configure a lot but then the migration was very challenging because of that complexe structure.
- Prepare your public services staff with the loss of the OPAC. This is even more important than the first point. Primo is very different from the OPAC. Force people how to use it! Ask for feedback. We had to "indoctrinate" our staff to being developmement partners. We have to use it to improve it.
- Clean up your data. Obvious but important! Records not problematic in Aleph became so in Alma. Look at your MARC fields, how is Primo going to use them, vendors etc. Anything that may work fine in your current environment may not in a new one. Start now!

How do we use Alma:
Our department is the lifecycle of all monographic material. My focus was on the acquisitions side. We are loading files of vendor supplies, OCLC cat records, both for approval and for overlay vendor records, EDI invoices, sending invoice data to the Uni financial system, loading e-book records, cataloguing as needed and we are using Alma's work orders to track the various processes, something we had been dreaming of being able to do. Alma provides this functionality as it is built in. for example the task list, exceptions that need staff attention. Alma groups things for you so you don't need to constantly search various parts of the system. The import profiles, the set up for bring things in is beautifully designed.

That's my quick overview of our recent migration and current status.