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ILS Migration

Change Management

The Good, the Bad & the Ugly

Janice Banser, Systems Librarian

Simon Fraser University Library

BC Code4Lib 2017

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Background

20 plus years on III Millennium - custom Discovery & Summon

  • 2014 - vendor presentations
  • 2015 - form ILS Steering Committee
    • Cross divisional (12 + members)
    • 6 working groups (much wider membership)
    • RFI/RFP process begins
  • 2016 - Chose Ex Libris - Alma/Primo
  • 2017 - Go Live May 2017

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Why Change Management?

  • Huge shift in staff workflows
    • emphasis moving more and more to electronic resources
  • Staff will need to acquire new skills - opportunity?
  • Job descriptions will need to be re-evaluated

Consequence of changing to new System:

  • Loss of perception of being an expert
  • Staff concerns around job security
  • Shift in institutional culture

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In the Real World

  • Change management consultant
    • ADKAR Change Management model - awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, reinforcement
  • Training
    • In-person vendor training
    • Ongoing staff training and experimentation in sandbox
    • Vendor provided video training
  • CUPE retirement offer - 7 staff retired
  • Internal communication
    • Staff website page, regular email updates, all staff meetings, invitation to sit in on Steering Committee
    • Primo Advisory team - included public services staff

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What we missed

Did you spot the big gap?

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Public

They really, really miss the OPAC and “WANT IT BACK”!!

  • Public services - Liaison Librarians
  • Faculty
  • Students - seem to be just fine with using Primo.

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Good, Bad, Ugly

Good - modern system, staff are encouraged to be problem solvers, distributed responsibility, APIs, integration with local applications, no longer need to manage 3 knowledge bases, proactive team

Bad - Knowledge base is rife with bad metadata, huge learning curve, some librarians uncomfortable with using Primo, many, many system updates

Ugly - small, but vocal, group of end users unhappy with losing the OPAC and do not like Primo.

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Next steps

  • Continued enhancements and improvements based on feedback�
  • Public Services task group looking at improving Librarian comfort with Primo�
  • Improved documentation�
  • Informal user testing

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“Culture eats strategy for lunch! ”

Janice Banser, Systems Librarian

Simon Fraser University Library

jbanser@sfu.ca

* Dula, Michael, et al. "Implementing a New Cloud Computing Library Management Service." Computers in Libraries, vol. 32, no. 1, Jan/Feb2012, pp. 6-40