Keynote – Panel
Breakout Sessions 1
Who’s the Student? Users Teach Librarians To Embrace Primo
Librarians have been slow to fully embrace web-scale discovery tools like Primo. At the City University of New York (CUNY), many libraries are featuring Primo as the default search on their library homepage while preserving links to the catalog and databases. Not surprisingly, with Primo front and center, its use continues to increase. Students like it and quickly learn to navigate its basic features.
This session will highlight why using and teaching Primo should no longer be seen as merely an option. We will touch on some of its inherent weaknesses and its many benefits. We will also review CUNY’s use of SFX statistics to understand how Primo is accessed.
M. Anne O’Reilly, Maureen Richards – LaGuardia Community College, John Jay College
Reclassing Dewey to LC: That Time when Alma was really your best friend / Topic: Alma; Reclassification; API; MarcEdit
The University of Connecticut Library still has a small portion of its physical collection classed using the Dewey Classification system. The total number of those physical items exceeds 160,000. Until recently the reclassification from Dewey to Library of Congress was done in spurts as well as on an ongoing as needed basis. Our approach to this reclassification radically changed because of the looming Master Plan to renovate the library and specifically the floor where this Dewey collection resides. This past year, we launched a pilot project where part of the reclassification process was automated for a small subset of the Deweys. This involved using OCLC’s metadata API, Alma’s ability to update LC call numbers in holdings, Alma analytics, MarcEdit, and students. This presentation will describe the project, its background, the process put in place, how successful the project has been thus far, and the lessons learned.
Jennifer M. Eustis – University of Connecticut Library
Breakout Sessions 2
Discovery and Resource Sharing
Illiad integration with the Primo New UI
Allen Jones – The New School
Moving a Library – a System’s Perspective
When the data in your ILS has grown with different standards over time, how do you retrieve the information you need to organize the retrieval and unpacking of over 2100 boxes of Rare books from off-site storage into a new Library building? JTS is in the process of grappling with exactly that scenario and we’d like to share some of the processes we’re using and the challenges facing us as we plan the move into the new building in Summer 2019.
Lisa Rohde, Naomi Steinberger – Jewish Theological Seminary Library
Integrated OER (Open Educational Resources) into course reserves Cancelled
Alma provides an opportunity to add a variety of materials such as print, digital, URL and chapter to course reserve. Since 2017, the math department of Middlesex Community College started to use the local designed OER (open educational resources) textbooks for their top enrollment courses. The presentation will focus on integrating all the OER materials and course guide together, and embed into blackboard. In addition, the presentation also demo some the latest releases, which are related to course reserve.
Cindy Li – Middlesex Community College
Breakout Sessions 3
Can ILLiad Talk to Alma? Using ILLiad Add-ons
This presentation is for staff who are considering using ILLiad add-ons with Alma. We will discuss the use of add-ons for borrowing and lending processes. Information on installing, configuring and troubleshooting problems, as well as potential changes in workflow, will be included.
Ben Hogben – Ithaca College
Alma Analytics – Tips & Tricks
Margaret Briand Wolfe – Boston College
Primo Central vs Alma – and why you need them both and how they work together
David Schuster – Binghamton University
Breakout Sessions 4
What is the Analytics SWIG and What Does It Do For the Ex Libris User Community?
This talk with present the activities undertaken by the Analytics SWIG such as evidence gathering and documentation, as well as submitting items to NERS. It will discuss in practical terms how the SWIG benefits all Ex Libris systems including Alma, Summon, Primo, and Leganto, and how those users can share concerns with the SWIG.
MiraSpace: Creating a Digital Collections portal using Alma, Primo, ArchivesSpace, and Mirador
Describes Boston College’s migration from Digitool to an Alma/Primo based platform for Digital Collections. See: https://library.bc.edu/digitized-collections. Dubbed “Miraspace,” this solution is a microservices approach for presenting digitized images within a library discovery tool. We harnessed both open source solutions (ArchivesSpace and the Mirador IIIF viewer) as well as Ex Libris’ Alma and the new Primo Collections Lobby functionality. The resulting display has been a drastic improvement over our old Digitool platform. We will discuss why we chose this path, how we implemented, and the challenges we encountered along the way.
Emily Singley – Boston College
ExLibris provided session – Primo VE and Primo Studio
Katy Aronoff – Ex Libris
Breakout Sessions 5
Managing Primo problems with optimal user experience in mind.
Williams Libraries recently developed a system for users to report problems they included while using the library catalog (Primo). Building on a method created by the Orbis Cascade Alliance, we built a Google form that allows users to report problems connecting to full text (or any other issue) and automatically includes the permalink in their response. We soon realized that we could improve the user experience by automatically forwarding these reports into our Ask a Librarian email service (LibAnswers) so we could offer alternative solutions while we worked on fixing the initial issue. The presentation will include an explanation of the process, reactions from public service staff, methods for managing the problems once submitted, and code shared on GitHub for those interested in implementing the tool at their own library.
Emery Shriver- Williams College
Practical tips for those daily snags, bumps, joys, and everything in-between
Leading an implementation, project team, committee or another group? Come hear practical tips from the trenches on how to motivate and encourage others through the process and positively address team dynamics to successfully move forward. Participants will also learn about related educational theories and have the opportunity to discuss situations they have experienced.
Heidi Webb, Logan Rath – Upstate Medical University, The College at Brockport
Discovery Layer Decisions and Configurations – A Panel Discussion
Decisions abound when implementing a discovery layer. Does the library use one discovery layer to access all their materials? Or select multiple products? Or create different instances of the same product? For the different products/instances, which parts of the collection are targeted? This session will be a panel discussion between four libraries on how they reached their decisions, how they implemented them, and how they assessed their impact.
Ray Schwartz – William Paterson University
Breakout Sessions 6
Moving from Primo to Primo VE
In Spring 2018, we migrated from Primo (NUI with BO) to Primo VE as part of Ex-Libris’ early adoption program. We’d like to share our experience of the process with other ENUG members and let them know what to look out for if they choose to make a similar transition. Depending on the length of the presentation, this would likely include some discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of Primo VE compared to Primo (NUI with BO), some usability testing workflows that worked for our VE implementation, and perhaps a demo of certain features.
Stephen Buss, Matt Gallagher – University of the Sciences
Aleph–>Rosetta Descriptive Metadata Synch
“As part of a migration from DigiTool to Rosetta, the Center for Jewish History wanted to change our cataloging practices so that staff would only edit descriptive metadata in Aleph – but still have that metadata be available in Rosetta. Ex Libris assured us that synching the two systems as we wanted, so that metadata updates would be pushed from Aleph to Rosetta, was possible! In reality, no customer had ever tried this before, nor did Ex Libris have any documentation on how it might be done. In this session we will (1) discuss the difficulties we faced in working with Ex Libris to invent a new workflow between the systems, and (2) show the Aleph and Rosetta configurations we eventually landed upon to make it work.”
Jaime Taylor, Kevin Powell – Center for Jewish History
Filtering Alma sets with indication rules – Hands-On
“Creating sets based on MARC data that’s not in the searchable Alma fields can be…less than intuitive. Want to get a list of titles with that one code in the 008? Do you want to do something with all the records with a local field carried over from your migrated MARC? You can use “”indication rules”” to gather those records into a set. The presenter will demonstrate the steps, logic, and tools available to filter a set of titles using indication rules, and will open the floor to ideas of filters you might like to try in your own Alma. * Bring a laptop for hands-on practice! You will need a Cataloger role in order to edit Indication Rules.”
Benjamin Hockenberry – St. John Fisher College
Breakout Sessions 7
Sunsetting Seniors: making saints out of sinners
Saints or sinners? How do we get our materials back prior to graduation and how do we clear the senior accounts? We were on Millennium for over 20 years and we had an almost bullet-proof system for getting all our materials returned. Our move to Alma forced us to redesign our process. Nearly two years later, we find some of our new procedures work well and some need improvement. We would like to share our process and learn from you. This session is designed to be highly interactive.
Nadine Nance, Walter Komorowski – Williams Libraries
Migration Misunderstandings
When the Washington Research Library Consortium was preparing to migrate to Alma, we had a number of assumptions about the way the system works that turned out to be false. We will share lessons we learned the hard way, with a focus on implementing technical services in a consortia environment.
Kristen Fredericksen, Alayne Mundt – Catholic University of America, American University
SOApalooza’
Discuss Allegheny College’s Alma / Summon Over Alma implementation. Outline the decision process for selecting SOA and talk about the challenges and opportunities it has brought to our library.
Brian Kern, Aimee Reash – Allegheny College
Breakout Sessions 8
Syncing the data : OCLC reclamation before Alma
Rutgers University Libraries completed implementation of Alma and Primo in June 2018. As the previous ILS, SirsiDynix Symphony, was deployed at Rutgers in 1997, a variety of pre-migration data cleanup projects were necessary as part of the implementation process. One of the largest and most important of these endeavors was a reclamation of WorldCat holdings via OCLC Datasync/Bibliographic Collection. This presentation will address the many stages of reclamation, including pre-reclamation cleanup, batch loading and processing of OCLC records to and from WorldShare, and post-reclamation cleanup. Additionally, the presenters will address the problems encountered in the reclamation process as multiple passes of the data were required to establish the best data alignment between the local catalog and WorldCat. Finally, post-Alma implementation cleanup work as a result of reclamation will be addressed.
Colin Bitter, Mary Beth Weber – Rutgers University
Resource sharing APIs and Primo
Historically, request services have meant sending users to other services to submit fulfillment requests via openURL. What if they didn’t have to? The New School has integrated Relais D2D and Illiad requests within the primo customization framework. This presentation will show how we did it and provide some data on user engagement.
Allen Jones – The New School
Electronic Resources Simplexity
The current environment for electronic resource management, discovery, and access is a very complex system on the back end, with the goal of having a simple experience for users on the front end. One way to understand the ER environment is to look back to the beginnings and build the system from the ground up. The presenters will build an electronic resource environment from the basic components, simplifying the complexity, so that participants can better understand the relationship between the library services platform and integrated discovery system, and its implications for our researchers’ discovery experience.
Rebecca Nous, Jan Waterhouse – University at Albany (SUNY)