Notes from monthly TSI JSMIN meeting, May 14, 2015
Attending: Adam Chandler, Sarah Elman, Kate Harcourt, Jesse Koennecke, Jim LeBlanc, Chew Chiat Naun, Mark Wilson
- Jesse and Mark (along with Lydia Pettis and Breck Witte) attended the Ex Libris ELUNA meeting in Minneapolis, May 5-8, on behalf of the 2CUL LMS Replacement Team. In conjunction with the conference, all four participated in the full-day Alma technical seminar, which was very useful for getting familiar with the current release of the system – which has come a long way since the 2CUL Joint LMS Project Scoping Analysis. In addition, help files are very well-written and are context-sensitive. Both Jesse and Mark feel the system may be viable for our needs. The team is hoping to get access to a sandbox soon, so that team members can continue to poke around in it. It is important to note that virtually all current Alma customers are using Ex Libris's Primo as their discovery system – with the possible exception of a small library in Australia that Jesse is trying to track down. The team is also looking to schedule some calls with Kuaii OLE customers and possibly set up a site visit to look more carefully at OLE during the next few weeks. The team is working with a list of 350-400 requirements for the replacement LMS, with 150 of these related to technical services. As directed in its charge, JSMIN will take responsibility for addressing and recommending staffing adjustments and requirements to support the technical services aspects of system migration and implementation, as needed.
- We reviewed progress on some of the TSI goals for 2015. In particular, we talked about sharing checklists and processes for pre-migration data cleanup, something that Cornell has already started and Columbia is poised to begin. In addition, the general goal of the 2CUL e-resources units to step up work on shared workflows will soon likely include updating of license information to allow for smooth migration. Sarah explored the EastView record quality problem with her colleagues at the annual meeting of the Council of East Asian Libraries (CEAL) in March. She reports that there is a Chinese vendor who is interested in selling us records, but is not sure whether the vendor would agree to do bibliographic maintenance for serials. There is also a possibility that we can get records from the UC–San Diego for Chinese titles. In any case, we are hoping to persuade EastView to supply more catalog records for their material, given the poor quality of the metadata we get for these items via SerialsSolutions.