One year on - Sharing Millennium: Is the honeymoon over?

In July 2009, WA Dept of Health moved in after a huge amount of preliminary work, including a total reworking of all our codes and system parameters, a lot of onsite training, and many, many hours in teleconference with our project manager in the US. So what have been the good things and the not so good things about this arrangement? What’s worked and what hasn’t?

One of the areas which we thought would be an issue and caused a fair amount of angst initially with staff was the whole concept of sharing a database, but this has been a non-issue.

What has also worked to our advantage was the amount of time and effort we put into our data clean-up before Health moved in. This has meant that State Library and Health records are easily recognisable, naming conventions are meaningful and intuitive and the system is now scalable, if we decided to expand our shared arrangement with other organisations.

One thing we anticipated would cause some headaches, is the way we had to set-up our OPACs. The URL which we had always used for our catalogue became the entry point to both catalogues. To get to just State Library’s OPAC, “S2” added to the end as we became scope 2. This meant that any bookmarks and links to our catalogue changed.

ICT issues have sometimes been challenging, but in May we moved away from a shared IT environment. We now have staff in control who understand the business of the library and the importance of our relationship with Health. We’ve learnt, however, to keep Health informed of even minor network updates, just in case there is a domino affect somewhere along the line and a resulting system outage.

As separate government departments, we have separate record keeping systems and are likely to be duplicating information. There is a need for shared documentation, and ideally there would also be a shared online working space.

Financial management and the process for recouping costs from Health is an area we have grappled with.

So is the honeymoon over? Yes, it probably is. We spent a lot of time getting ready for the big day, it was all very exciting, but we didn’t think so much about what it would be like long term. Most days its business as usual, but like any partnership, we have always consider the other party. Now it’s happily ever after.