1. TCC’s Alma Implementation Experience

2. 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
6th 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
Ann
– experienced Voyager cataloger
- also took over acquisitions implementation.
Jana
– experienced cataloger, but no Voyager experience.
- stepped in part way through implementation because our previous coordinator left (Dan Bull)
Jim
- WebVoyage experience, Oracle (SQL) experience
- No library experience before 2001

3. 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

4. Who are we? Ann Kutulas - Voyager Cataloger
Jana Murphy - No Voyager Experience
Jim Robinson - Programmer

5. 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.

6. 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…

7. Patron Load 1st 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.

8. Patron Load 2nd Attempt Thanks David Schuster!!
Load students first, then load staff.
Still has problems. Only the first few hundred patrons would load.
File size problem?

9. Patron Load

10. Patron Load

11. Patron Load 3rd Attempt Broke students into 13 files
Staff was a separate file

12. Patron Load

13. Patron Load
The last role to load for a patron is their role in Alma

14. Patron Load

15. Patron Load 4th 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.

16. Patron Load
Students and staff load at 1:00 a.m.

17. Patron Load Staff load again every 6 hours, which varies.
Since then, a 6 a.m. time has been added.
If it’s not broken, don’t fix it!

18. 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.

19. Reporting Tried to teach librarians simple Access reports.
Created web interfaces for reports.

20. Reporting

21. Reporting

22. 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.

23. Reporting

24. Calendar Northeast Campus normal operating hours: Open 7:00 am
Close 10:00 pm

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

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

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

28. Withdrawn Items Reporting

29. 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)

30. 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
Items in red present challenges
Crucial ones as used to determine the depreciated value.

31. 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
Ideally we want the price information from invoice not replacement cost.
Accurate date currently available only for items created in Alma.

32. Withdrawn Items Reporting
Out-of-the-box Alma report “Item Withdrawals”
Count only
Our 1st 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
Functionality added in Feb. release but still very limited data available for items with deleted holdings

33. Withdrawn Items Reporting
Current workaround procedure
Statistics note 3 “withdrawn”
Statistics note 2 “dd/mm/yyyy” – deletion date
Run local Analytics report
Match results against our Voyager item information exported into Access table to get price and accurate create date – match point: Originating System ID
This is what we are doing until our cases are resolved.
Running a Change Physical Items job to add Statistics notes.

34. 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

35. Withdrawn Items Reporting
Filters
Statistics Note 3 is equal to / is in withdrawn
AND
Life Cycle is not equal to / is not in Deleted
Happy to share the report if anybody is interested.

36. Withdrawn Items Reporting
Future
We have cases open and we are looking forward to simplifying the process in the future.
I am told that the process was very straightforward in Voyager because the price information was readily available and I am hoping that, with time, it will become straightforward in Alma as well.

37. Acquisitions & Cataloging
Challenges and lessons learned

38. 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!)

39. 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

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

41. Steps to EDI:
Set up New Order Import Profiles (right now we have 20 different New Order Profiles)

42. Steps to EDI :

43. 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)

44. 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

45. 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)

46. 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)

47. 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…

48. ??Questions??

49. Contact Information
Jim Robinson
Jana Murphy
Ann Kutulas