Elena Menendez-Alonso, Plymouth University
9th largest UK higher education institution, with a recent development of distance learning. The library is open 24/7, we have 75+ staff, 500,000 books/e-books, 90 electronic resource packages, 16,800 unique serial titles. Our e-provision is growing and we are supporting the digital strategy.
Over the last 5-6 years we have had a lot of developments and our University sees the library as an important asset.
Our relationship with Ex Libris: Voyager 2004, SFX 2006, MetaLib+Verde 2007, Primo 2012 and hoping to be Alma early adopters at the beginning of next year.
Reasons for moving to the cloud:
- We were going to implement Primo
- We wanted to make savings on licensing and hardware because, as well as on resources
- We needed technical support, especially 24/7 since that's our opening days
Our process to move to the cloud started in October 2011 with the Primo project kicking off and we went Primo "beta" in March 2012 after we ensured the servers and the software were ready and installed. Our resources included a project Office in Hamburg, the local team in Plymouth University, the Ex Libris Cloud services support team in Amsterdam and the Voyager engineers in Chicago.
We found there was a lack of documentation on technical requirements. With Primo we started the configurations on the test server, but we realised we couldn't access the production server and things were different. We understand with hindsight that this is not uncommon with Ex Libris products but we would have found it useful to have this information upfront.
We also found that we could have done with more clarification between respective responsibilities. We expected Ex Libris to do the whole configurations for us but that was not the case. We had to rely on our systems librarian but he didn't have all the necessary information. So it is also about communication. We realised that Chicago is not as well integrated with European offices unfortunately. We also came accross a bug in V8.1 that meant the transfer of bibliographic information with the BL was not seemless.
Pros of going to the Cloud:
We had a project manager who provided great communication and support, advice on legal issues etc. There was the prospect at some point of having to host Voyager in Chicago rather than in Europe but Ex Libris had a plan B which we didn't know about.
We have been getting good performance and stability on the system, less downtime and fewer CRM incidents (and have been on the Cloud for 9 months). The transactions are going faster.
So globally our experience has been very positive. We would advice to watch out for documentation about configuration and roles and responsibilities, as well as communication. We think it will now be easier for us to move to Alma.
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