Categories
Library Issues MPOW OCLC Web Scale

Are we live?

Today is the scheduled Go Live date for the first implementation of the OCLC Web Scale Management services, and we are so close that we can almost touch it. We spent the day doing massive testing of the various pieces of WMS: Circulation, Acquisitions, Cataloging, and our WMS-driven Worldcat Local, with the OCLC team working with us to tackle anything that popped up. As you might expect, being the first to implement this radically new a system brings things to light that neither we nor OCLC entirely knew about or understood…the infrastructure for this is only now really being tested with live data from a working library. I know that a lot of eyes are on this to see how it works (or doesn’t work), so here’s a quick rundown of where we are today.

Circulation could, as far as the system is concerned, go live now…it’s a functional system at this point, with all of our policies in place and working for all of our patron types. However, we now have a backlog of circ data to catch up on (the delta between the last massive data load and now), and we’re proceeding with it, and with further data-verification testing at the same time.

Acquisitions/Cataloging is so, so close. We successfully received and cataloged books today from scratch for the very first time, and walked them all the way through the process of preparing them to circulate. As a part of this process we discovered that we are going to have to re-evaluate our workflows even more…even we, who have been preparing for this for 6 weeks now, didn’t really grok the degree to which this alters our traditional workflow. So over the next few days, we’re going to be taking a closer look at those, and see how we take advantage of the massively streamlined workflows that are possible with WMS. Acquisitions is still very much a module in progress…it’s much ahead of schedule as far as the initial install schedule goes, and I’m impressed with how far it’s gotten in almost a ridiculously short timeframe.

The last piece of the puzzle is Worldcat Local, which is about 95% of the way there for our needs. The one major display issue cropped up last week as we started to see our serials holdings in Local, and that display issue is already scheduled as an out-of-cycle fix. We’ve seen the fixed display, and it works really well.

I can’t really explain how hard many people have worked to get us to this point. Andrea Schurr, our Web Technologies and ILS Librarian has worked multiple 80 hour weeks to get all our data out of our current system and into WMS. The entire staff at Lupton Library have laid other needs aside to help out with every little piece of this project, completing things in weeks that were timelined for months of work yet. And the team at OCLC has just kicked ass responding to questions, pushing for updates, and generally being amazing in helping us understand how this beautiful beast is constructed so that we can get the most out of it.

So with all that said, it comes down to: did we make our implementation date? Are we “live” with WMS? At this point, for my purposes, we are. We have about 98% of our data in the system, and the few straggling records are ones that require some serious cleanup…which we’re doing, and those will be done in the next couple of weeks. We are are working towards catching up our circulation activity of the last 2-3 weeks, which will take a few days. As well, we are going to take a few more days to examine our acquisitions and cataloging practices in order to make sure that we’re using the system and our staff as efficiently as possible, and then begin the process of catching those data bits up…if you aren’t processing as you go, it’s amazing how quickly things fall out of sync. And our patrons are already using Worldcat Local, driven by WMS data, for discovery and resource location.

Are we as live as I’d hoped? Honestly, no, we’re not. But as my Dean keeps reminding me: it’s not about us, it’s about the patrons. We have to get just a bit more testing, more data verification, and more workflow examination on our end in order to make sure that what we’re delivering to our patrons is the best possible experience we can for resource discovery at UTC.

Here’s my takeaway from this whole process up to this point: we now have the first working system of this kind in any library in the world. We moved from our previous ILS to this completely new model and set of data structures in just 6 weeks, or roughly 1/6th the time of the average ILS migration. We are working very hard, still, to make this as good an experience as we can for our students, faculty, and staff. Who can complain if we take a couple of extra days to triple check a few things? 🙂

Categories
MPOW OCLC Web Scale

Web Scale launch delay

In our original timeline, we were supposed to have a soft-launch of our OCLC Web Scale Management system tomorrow, August 20, where we went live with Check in/Check out functionality. We are very, very, very close…but it’s unlikely that we will actually launch tomorrow. Here’s the short list of issues we are still working through:

  • Currently, the locations in our Worldcat Local instance aren’t accurate. This should, literally, be fixed tonight. But we’ll need some time to spot check to make sure they came through accurately.
  • Ditto with the Local Holdings on our Serials…they are starting to show up today, but we will need a bit of time to check some of them.
  • The loan rules for circulation went live today as well, but moving into circulating, even dual with our old catalog, without the chance to really run them through their paces makes my Access department want to strangle me.
  • There is one issue on the backend having to do with reporting that we have to have a solution for in order to satisfy our state auditors. Said solution is, we think, there…but not demonstrated. The state will hunt us down if we don’t demonstrate before going live.

Our data (bib, holding, patron, circulation) has been successfully pulled and imported into WMS. We’re missing a small handful of records that we’re still hunting down OCLC Numbers for…but we’re talking about 2000 or so records out of 600K+. We have pushed more data into the system than anyone else, and it is still responding very well…the performance is impressive, given that it’s operating over the web.

All in all…we are very, very close. So close that it pains me deeply to think about NOT going live on schedule. But schedules are flexible, and if we slip by a week, I’m not going to cry failure. So we implement a complete ILS transfer in 7 weeks instead of 6 weeks…no bigs.

TL;DR: We’re a little behind. But we’re almost there. We are still completely on target for a full live launch on Aug 30th, and we will almost certainly have the public catalog up and running well before that (technically it’s running now, but with some UI issues). I still expect us to start the limited-live before that as well for circulation…but it won’t be tomorrow.

Categories
Books MPOW

Collection distribution by publication date

At my place of work, we’re just beginning a massive weeding project as a part of the larger new library building project. We are hoping to weed the entire collection for, effectively, the first time in the history of the library. Needless to say, it’s kind of going to own our lives for the next 18 months.

As a part of this, my awesome co-worker Andrea created this chart showing the distribution of publication dates for our collection. The massive amount of 1800’s is from our Early English Books Online collection, but the rest of it shows a pretty great distribution of “when did the library have funding” over the decades.

collection by pub date

Categories
MPOW

More UTC Library Rave videos

More videos collected from YouTube…these all from a single user, in the last couple of hours.

Categories
MPOW

UTC Library Rave – Fall 2009

Looks like another flash mob/flash rave happened at MPOW, UTC Library, last night. From the footage already up on YouTube, looks like this time someone convinced the powers that be to let the students into the library instead of pepper spraying them outside of it.

Here’s the early footage:

EDIT: More videos coming online now

Categories
Library Issues MPOW

Metasearch aka Federated Search aka The Mind Killer

This is the period during the year at MPOW that we are reviewing our goals, and really looking at what the next 6 months will bring. As a portion of that, it’s up to me to try and figure out how our IT department fits in with this, given that we are mentioned in no less than 99.999999943% of the Library Wide goals. Pretty much every overarching goal for the library as a whole has some part of it that IT is going to support, or design, or maintain, or drive.

This makes for job security. It also makes for many hats.

After looking at where we are headed (new building, re-thinking the library, focusing on the students) we decided that the area that could most impact the way that we do things is metasearch. No one is happy with their ILS, and patrons just aren’t using our catalog at all…circulation statistics for books is through the floor. But foot traffic, website visits, database use, reference questions…all are up from previous years. So we’re definitely being used, just not for books. Given that the library “brand” is books, that’s worrying.

As an attempt to bridge this gap to the books, the library IT council decided unanimously to pursue Metasearch over the course of this year. The idea is, of course, to have books presented to patrons side-by-side with all of our other resources.

The gap between theory and practice in this case seems like the Grand Canyon.

Is anyone happy with a metasearch product? I know that most of us agree that the technology isn’t mature yet, but at this point implementation of a metasearch solution seems less daunting than trying to roll to another ILS. Especially since I can give LibraryFind a try without signing away my soul to the Library Corporate Masters.

Categories
MPOW

Preparing for the onslaught

So the relative blog silence has been brought on by the frenzied preparation for the beginning of the semester. We’ve updated our ILS, which brought about a TON of unforeseen changes (doesn’t it always?). Our vendor, VTLS, pointed out time and time again that our installation was a bit odd…it was originally done by someone very familiar with the software, and he took lots of liberties with the install. This means a LOT of things don’t work for us…directory structures are all wrong, so stuff just often falls apart when you try to run it.

As a consequence of moving to a more standardized install, the URL for our catalog changed.

I’ll say that one more time. The URL to our catalog changed.

Do you have any idea how many freaking things depend on that URL? I certainly do now.

*sigh*