Bar Veinstein, Corporate Vice President, Resource Management Solutions
[live-blog IGeLU Conference 2013, Berlin]
This session is about Alma.If you'd asked me 3 years ago I wouldn't have thought we would have reached 33 live institutions today, which is quite amazing. There are an additional 52 in implementation phase.
Success factors: Customer trust (reliability, security), east of implementation, openness & interoperability, depth of functionality & efficiency, innovation/cutting edge. People talk a lot about ineroperability but it is not until I joined this industry that I grasped what this really means. Banks compete with each other, they don't share api's etc.
Multi-tenancy, why should you care? A lot of customers don't care or prefer the hosted environment because they think it means a dedicated environment for them. The multi-tenancy is valuable for the vendor, but actually it is for the customer as well. This is bercause:
- One version: no customer is left behind when the software is updated. This means there is one single version for everyone and it doesn't matter anymore which version we're on. It also means that new features are made available much more quickly because we don't need to maintain older versions
- Painless upgrades: vendor-managed updates, automatic
- Disaster recovery: a matter of economies of scale, with quicker response and resolution
- Vendor is responsible: customisations & integrations mus work in the new version
One of the main concerns of customers is security. We need a multi-dimensioinal approach. We take this very seriously, we have an ISO certification, we have an external company that monitors 24/7 our firewalls, we've implemented a lot of capabilities on the business continuity etc. This is valid for all products but it is mostly because of more and more working in the Cloud that we've put in place the 24/7 monitoring. With regards to Alma, it is not possible to connect to it without https. For cases where the protocol of an institution is not encrypted, we've developed a solution that uses ssl as a wraper, to ensure that the communication is secure and encypted.
Ex Libris can monitor user experience per transaction, such as end user time, health of the transaciton, errors, calls per minute, etc. so we look at the performance of all the instances across the world. This is something new specifically developed with Alma. Alma deplys in months, not in years, this includes ERM and link resolver and in some cases, discovery. This is what customers have asked for. We know it's not perfect yet, we know some people are complaining and we need to work on better training. But we've created a methodology around this. We are also working on migration from a diversity of other products.
We have a strong vision for developer collaboration. We understand that moving to the Could with sql access is not feasible. We have to take the responsibility of developiong the api's so we have a developer platform, where we are committing to deliver these api's and services and extensions to apply them. Until now, we've developed them but haven't yet done all the delivery. But we are going to embedd the API Management Infrastructure, to allow us to have much stronger capabilities for the delivery of api's. The API Console will be available as part of the portal so people can learn and test api's before implementing. This will be released in the second half of 2014.
Dvir Hoffman, director, Marketing and Product Management
Roadmap planning - some highlights
Collaboration - maximise cooperation, integration and sharing between institutions while supporting each institution's particular worklows and standards
Efficiencies - reduce costs by streamlining processes and redirecting staff to other more important taks
Digital - Continue to enhance unified resource management and provide increased consolidation options
We arealso working hard on analytics solutions. The community zone includes more authority records, we've created a working group to bring a community catalogue in the comunity zone. We are also working on the unified digital resource management.
Next year we will focus on emerging electroinc licensing and purchasing models. The community catalogue will be licence free, i.e. CC0 as we are committed to oppeness. We want our Knowledge Base to expand. Alma should be a multi-format solution and was built from the ground with this multi-format model in view. We want more predictive analytics.
We have a master plan but we maintain the flexibility to adapt and allow for changes in the roadmap. Initial plans for the next release is customer values:
- Overlap analysis = ability to overlap analysis of packages or between vendors: we plan to push the analytics into the workflows, firstly by helping to save costs for acquisitions
- Next year we want to provide you with a benchmark analytics by developing KPIs.- you can define your own and they can be compared with the Alma community
- We continue our investment in digital resources, by providing enhanced collection and metadata management for existing digital collections - no need to migrate files or ingest processes, thereby simplifying the process for staff. Provide ongoing OAI-PMH based harvesting of resources into Alma
- Resource sharing in ILL, i.e. Resource Sharing Driven Acquisitions
- Copyright control, embedd licensing information, monitoring digitisation requests in order to make sure thee are not copyright violations
- Patron Requests for Purchase - better service for patrons
Customers can choose their networks, so you can be part of a consortium but there is flexibility, such as shared catalogue, acquisitions, resource sharing (ILL) etc. Other things we are working on are:
- New purchasing options with vendors: this should come in the next few months, we are working with vendors to streamline the processes, reduce duplication etc.
- We've also engaged actively with some vendors in terms of security, some don't use secure protocols and are not Cloud ready, so we are working on that
- New acquisitions models: vendors themselves need to make decisions, especially for electronic resources
- Bibframe: we are taking an active part
Questions & answers
Q: What about e-book acquisitions workflows and platforms, e.g. ebrary etc.
A: We started working with a few vendors to streamline acquisition processes, including e-books, so using Alma acquisitions tools. The customers using Alma today have e-book purchasing. It is not yet very efficient. So we are working with the vendors to integrate different selection processes and loading the metadata. It's not easy, some vendors are very protective because they make money on their metadata.
Q: New Developer Platform and API console: how are you going to communicate with us, the developers, what is your stragegy?
A: We haven't engaged yet because we had to finalise the vendor we will use first. Once the contract is signed (end 2013) we will start engaging with the user group at the latest at the beginning of 2014.
Q: Electronic resource management: are you talking to local initiatives, e.g. in the UK we have KB+ and are you talking to JISC etc.
A: We are aware of KB+ in the context of licensing, so we've started active engagement, we are looking into ways to integrate or link into external products. This is not just with Alma, but also concerns SFX. We believe working at the national level, in Germany there are other similar programmes and we work together. So it's not because we work closely with vendors that we forget national initiatives.
Q: Alma puts a lot of emphasis on opening up and using CC0, will you do the same with your own Knowledge Base?
A: Good question! At the moment there are no such plans but we should discuss this. We are not a non-profit organisation, so we make money on Alma, and because we are profitable we were able to develop a good product. We should raise this quesiton in front of the management team.
Q: In which way are you thinking of public libraries? Especially interested in circulaiton and e-books readers
A: Most customers of ExLibris are academic but there are lots of consortiums that include more and more other types of libraries and we know we have to focus on this. In terms of e-books readers we are talking to some vendors. This is on our roadmap.
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