This session is about an update from ExLibris on where the Alma deveopmentnow stands and how this new product is unfolding, as well as presentations from representatives from four institutions that have made the commitment to Alma; they will give us their insight into the product and into their decision to adopt Alma to replace their curent systems. If time permits, there will be an aooortunity for questions form the audience.
Moderator: Michele Newberry, Florida virtual Campus-Gainseville: IGeLU steering committee
We will be starting with an update form ExLibris and then the four early adopters. I am going to turn it over to Bar.
ExLibris Update
Bar Veinstein, VP, Resrouce Management Solutions, ExLibris
I was wondering how many people would turn up this morning. A lot of people wonder what Alma stands for, actually nothing, that's why it's not written in capital letters. I will talk of intresting facts about Alma. My presentations will last about 40 minutes because I think it-s important that we hear the other presentations!
Here is a confusing slide which shows the Alma journey. I will not use this slide anymore. We went live in the beginning of the year. boston College was the first customer to go into production but for the last 4 years we've been working hard to keep the schedule for going into production.
I will give you 3 examples of great benefits Alma brings to the customers. Alma is not just the technology, it's a bit change in the company as well. I also want to talk about the different paths to go into Alma. We don't expect everyone to jump into Alma but we want to show you what's good about it.
Key objectives when we designed Alma:
- efficiencies: unified management
- collaboration
- Innovation
Alma screenshot showing an example of a form for physical material. Location of the item, vendor information, pricing, funding etc.
Now is the same screen for e-resources, the same fields appear again. So the idea is that when we looked at the workflows, although there are differences, there is a lot in common. That is the essence of the unified management. How to keep the uniqueness of certain type of material and make the workflows work seemlessly.
Some workflows are very intertwined. In Alma, we don't use modules anymore because it is all workflows. There is no such separation.
Screenshot of the dashboard: it is made of widgets.
Collaborative zone: a place for consortia. Example of a simple search, we look for certain titles in the private zone, that is our own collection. If we switch to the community zone, and you don't need to run the search again, you search within the consortia collections.
Analytics: we are not only talking of what's been happening but what will happening, so it is predictive. Alma analytics is integrated in the product itself. It is embedded in the dashboard and part of the workflows.
I will now switch over to work behind the scenes. We worked very hard to develop Alma. We started with one data centre in the US. We now have a 3rd one in Asia (Singapoure). We work with partners who provide services but the products are owned by Ex Libris. It's a cloud data centre. We release developments in small chunks but fairly quickly. We release Alma every month, it requires a lot of effort on the quality side, we're still working on that but it shows how quickly things are changing.
Implementation is changing very much at Ex Libris. We try to do that rapidly. For a large institution it shouldn't be more than 8 months. Our target is 4 to 8 months. We introduced the cowork implementation so we combine the implementation of various institutions.
Ex Libris does the initial configuration and then we teach the institution how to do the configurations itself. It makes the process simpler and quicker. We also create certification programmes. We have trained people internally. This is for customers, different types of users, etc. We try to be more consistent compared to what we did in the past.
This was a quick overview of where we are. How did we get there? There are several paths. One would be: you do nothing! The second path is to start moving towards the second generation platform. Two elements: the concept of cloud and discovery. Hosting your servers in a hosted environment is moving to a cloud service. Alma doesn't work with an OPAC. So discovery is very important. It is not a simple path. A lot of our customers try to run it together with their OPAC so moving to a discovery interfact only is a big step. The third path is the momentum that is going!
I will not pass over to the panel.
Partner/Adopters Update
Paul Bracke, Associate Dean for Digital Programs and Information Access, Purdue University
Trevor A. Dawes, Circulation Services Director, Princeton University Library
Angela Walker, Digital Library and Systems Manager, Salford University
Andy Land, Digital Systems Manager, The University of Manchester Library
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