TCC’s Alma Implementation Experience

Who are we?

 Tarrant County College  Opened South campus in 1965        Originally called Tarrant County Junior College Name changed in 1999 to Tarrant County College 6 th largest college/university in Texas Fall 2012 enrollment: 50,439 Spring 2013 enrollment: 46,750 Spring 2012 Distance Learning enrollment: 11,179 Average student age: 26 years

Who are we?

    Tarrant County College  5 campuses     Fort Worth (3 campuses) Arlington Hurst Other satellite campuses Trinity River East for Health Care Professionals Degrees: AA, AS, AA-Teaching, AAS 80 technical and transfer areas

Who are we?

 Ann Kutulas - Voyager Cataloger  Jana Murphy - No Voyager Experience  Jim Robinson - Programmer

Why Move to Alma?

 Dr. Richard Heyser, Ph.D. (our boss)  Implemented Voyager in 2001 from mainframe.

  Subscription, cloud-based solutions are Ex Libris ’ future.

The Cloud is supposed to make things easier:    Automatic updates!

No client installations!

Shared data is more accurate data!

 We had the money available.

Why Move to Alma?

 Aggressive Schedule (March – August)  We had the money available when we started the process in September 2012   Implementation by August 31, 2013 No disbursement of funds if it was spread over 2 fiscal years.

  Implemented Primo TotalCare and SFX with Voyager in September 2012.

We had problems with SFX from the start…

Patron Load

 1 st Attempt – load everything like Voyager  Programmers wrote a new script to re-create the Voyager SIF file as an XML file.

 But, Alma cannot have multiple roles for patrons like Voyager can.

 Patrons who were both student and staff were loaded with a seemingly random role.

Patron Load

 2 nd Attempt   Thanks David Schuster!!

Load students first, then load staff.

 Still has problems. Only the first few hundred patrons would load.

 File size problem?

Patron Load

Patron Load

Patron Load

 3 rd Attempt  Broke students into 13 files  Staff was a separate file

Patron Load

Patron Load

 The last role to load for a patron is their role in Alma

Patron Load

Patron Load

 4 th Attempt  Still having problems!

 Claudia is a student who works in the print shop.

 Claudia was loading as a student, not as staff.

 Dolph suspected there was a database commit timing issue.

 2 different load schedules.

Patron Load

Students and staff load at 1:00 a.m.

Patron Load

Staff load again every 6 hours, which varies.

Reporting

 Fines and Fees Report  Automatically generated by Alma each night.

 TCC uses Datatel Colleague for all business.

 TCC would have to spend >$10,000 to implement.

 Could not use Analytics (weekly until Nov 2013).

 Now usually nightly, but some problems.

Reporting

 Tried to teach librarians simple Access reports.

 Created web interfaces for reports.

Reporting

Reporting

Reporting

 Reluctant to give librarians Analytics access.

 Must provide training   Not any easier than Access reports Less data available  Only one role for Analytics – Design Analytics  All-or-nothing means users can alter reports.

 Slowly building a widget/dashboard library.

Reporting

Calendar

 Northeast Campus normal operating hours:  Open 7:00 am  Close 10:00 pm

Calendar

Exception: Open 8:00 a.m., Close 9:00 p.m.

Calendar

Exception: Closed from 7:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m.

Calendar

Exception: Closed from 12:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m.

Withdrawn Items Reporting

Withdrawn Items Reporting

• Itemized list of all items deleted that month.

• Required by TCC administration to help in determining the value of the library collections as defined by the

Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board

(the value of the collection has to be depreciated)

Withdrawn Items Reporting

Required Information: • Item ID • Title • Call Number • Library • Barcode • Description (Chronology and Enumeration) • Price • MMS ID • Holding ID • Date Created • Date Withdrawn • Item Policy

Withdrawn Items Reporting

Challenges

Price • In migration placed in replacement cost field • Replacement cost not available in analytics • Unable to get financial info related to specific Item ID Date Created • Analytics return migration date • Original date displays in item record summary

Withdrawn Items Reporting

 Out-of-the box Alma report “Item Withdrawals”  Count only  Our 1 st attempt, report based only on life cycle “deleted”  Detailed data only for items with existing holdings   Items with deleted holdings: Item ID, barcode and dates Includes items deleted as part of acquisitions workflow

Withdrawn Items Reporting

Current workaround procedure • Statistics note 3 “withdrawn” • Statistics note 2 “dd/mm/yyyy” – deletion date Current workaround procedure • Run local Analytics report Current workaround procedure • Match results against our Voyager item information exported into Access table to get price and accurate create date – match point: Originating System ID

Withdrawn Items Reporting

Physical Item Details • Item ID, Barcode, Enum A, Chron I, Creation Date, Originating System ID, Material Type, Item Policy, Creator, Stat. Note 2 & 3, Life Cycle, Description Bibliographic Details • Title, MMS ID Holding Details • Holding ID, Permanent Call Number, Summary Holding Location Library Unit PO Line Reference

Withdrawn Items Reporting

• Filters • Statistics Note 3 is equal to / is in withdrawn • AND Life Cycle is not equal to / is not in Deleted

Withdrawn Items Reporting

Future

Acquisitions & Cataloging

Challenges and lessons learned

Implementation (We made it!!)

 Short road Total time from start to production was about 4 months  Technical Services staff challenges  Acquisition Challenges  Immediate challenges after implementation  Processing of Physical items challenges  Positives of Alma (or Wow we couldn’t do that before!)

Technical Services Challenges     Getting staff members on board Training was focused on individual ordering of item, most of our ordering is in batches by cart  Training manuals keep being updated Keeping positive Short implementation/turn around time  Ordering for five libraries with five vendor accounts at our major vendor (plus different for entertainment items..DVDs,etc.)  Not much time for learning Cataloging b/c Catalogers busy helping to implement other areas

Acquisition Challenges

 Biggest challenge was getting EDI ordering to work with our major vendor Baker and Taylor  First tested right before “go live” August 15 2013, didn’t work, finally working at the end of November because of communication with Alma Developers, B&T representatives, and us

Steps to EDI:

 Set up New Order Import Profiles (right now we have 20 different New Order Profiles)

Steps to EDI :

Steps to EDI:

 Send out order using EDI, set up vendors for EDI (at this stage we have 8 vendor profiles set up for B&T)

Alma Cataloging  Centralized cataloging for our five libraries  Each physical item goes through cataloging  Overlay acq. records with OCLC record/or original cataloging as needed  Set up OCLC Gateway between OCLC & Alma

Physical Processing  Take items out of the work order process to set to transit to library (mark books as Done)  For spine labels we use the Spine O’Matic (has really helped us a lot)

Continuing Challenges

 Setting EDI vendor accounts for our DVDs (they are ordered differently through the vendor)  Number of items we order at a time, right now Alma seems to max out at 50 for us (this with importing the records and using EDI for ordering)  All the initial delays created a backlog  Work order departments are new to us (Manage In Process Items)

Alma Positives

 Can map our ISBNs directly to the identifier in the POL (don’t have to worry about the 020s fields)  Able to un-receive items  Ability to change Process type right on the item record (really helps for relinking)  And the list keeps growing…

??Questions??

Contact Information  Jim Robinson [email protected]

 Jana Murphy [email protected]

 Ann Kutulas [email protected]