1. Kuali OLE The Bloomsbury LMS Andrew Preater
Associate Director, Information Systems and Services
University of London
Kuali Days UK, 29 September 2013

2. Kuali OLE 1. Library services platform
Marshall Breeding on the LSP concept:
“To make up for functionality absent in their core integrated library systems, many libraries implemented a cluster of ancillary products, such as link resolvers, electronic resource management systems, digital asset management systems, and other repository platforms to manage all their different types of materials. The new products aim to simplify library operations through a more inclusive platform designed to handle all the different forms of content.”
As a project we’ve found two substantial forks in the road.
First: whether to implement a traditional LMS or something next-gen.
Second: whether to choose the closed-source vendor option, or commission an Open Source option.
2. A campus-wide, enterprise system
OLE is a genuine enterprise system in contrast with the historical / traditional LMS which has been ‘the has box sitting in the corner’, perhaps even a corner of the library itself. Certainly a system that doesn’t command much attention from IT or the broader university, and not something to be taken seriously as a core system. Our US partners have recognised a requirement for an enterprise approach and we agree. We think the LMS and resource discovery are about enterprise information, and should be seen as a key system enabling learning and teaching, and research. The nature of the data used means these systems are business critical for our HEIs.
3. By and for higher education
The focus in OLE is on what an academic / research library wants and needs in a system. The Kuali foundation ‘gets it’ in this respect, our functional experts – librarians and library workers – sit within a foundation that includes development expertise in analysis, consultancy, and project management. This means you avoid pitfalls that you can imagine if I asked you to imagine a library management system built by librarians. :-)

3. risk appetite Early adopters &
The focus in OLE is on what academic and research libraries want and need in a system. The Kuali foundation ‘gets it’ in this respect, our functional experts – librarians and library workers – sit within a foundation that includes development expertise in analysis, consultancy, and project management. This means you avoid the pitfalls you can imagine if I asked you to imagine an LMS ‘built by librarians’. :-)
I will say the arguments I’ve made previously in favour of OLE come across well to risk-taking innovators / early adopters but badly to risk averse HEIs…

5. It exists… OLE 0.8 June 2013 OLE 1.0 November 2013 OLE 1.5 Q1 2014
Kuali OLE is real software that exists.
OLE 0.8 was release in June on track.
OLE 1.0 is being released in November and is in packaging as of this.

6. This is a current screenshot showing part of the invoicing workflow in OLE 1.0. This is part of the OLE select & acquire module.
In my presentation at KDUK I had hidden this slide but there was interest in product screenshots on the day so I’m included it in the final public version.

7. What we are doing now…
Previous work 2012/13

8. Change LMS Everyone loves change, right? ;-)
We’ve not implemented OLE yet so what are we actually doing? LMS change – or LMS transformation – is our Phase One of OLE development and deployment.
At this point, mention the Collaborative Spec and a small amount about governance, legal, and financials – my assumption is Sharon will cover this already so just refer to that.
These are the things we’re doing in Senate House and the college systems librarian group to actually do the work.
Collaborative spec was a big one for us. Working with subject matter expects (those staff who know the work and the requirements) in our libraries to develop a spec that describes what we need. This turned out to be much more ‘aspirational’ than the traditional UK Core Spec. We’re using Atlassian Confluence as a tool for sharing and collaboration. Everything in the SHL Confluence pages on OLE was open from the beginning – every systems librarians meeting, every conversation with the project manager long enough to take notes.
Part of this is about gaining buy in from staff including ourselves as systems workers.
Governance, legal, financials: Essential to cover off this stuff if you want to run an operational shared service between multiple HEIs – even with our federal structure. I won’t talk about VAT and cost sharing groups.

9. 1. Discovery WP Spring & summer 2013
A project runs alongside the BLMS to replace our current ‘discovery potpourri’ with a next-generation discovery layer. This may or may not include resource discovery (a big index of journal and other full text content) as an element.
This is a pragmatic medium-term project that gives us a good-enough discovery layer to search our local bib database, archives catalog, ePrints repository, and digital assets management server. Dale Askey Taiga Forum article on ‘giving up on discovery’ quite interesting -

10. VuFind find.senatehouselibrary.ac.uk
This will definitely deal with local bib data, and for us will have archives and ePrints included.
Vufind and Blacklight are serious Open Source options for this, Vufind is especially interesting because Birkbeck, University of London are already using it live.
I said much more about this during the Discovery Strategies for OLE session - senate-house-libraries

11. Screenshot of Senate House Libraries, University of London test VuFind instance.
This is VuFind 2 running on a virtual machine. It’s straightforward to set up, it works, and it’s a great test-bed for decoupling

12. 2. Metadata optimization WP
Spring 2013 onwards
Metadata optimization includes scoping reclassification and ‘tidying up’ legacy bibliographic data from previous systems migrations and integrations.
Much of this goes back many years but we’ve not been able to approach it except under the aegis of a ‘big project’ with decent funding.
In case you were in any doubt, university SMT are not that interested in library bibliographic data. What they do care about is our researchers being able to find things in our library and catalogue, and they especially care about student experience for University of London users of our shared library service. So the way to go within the broader HEI is to pitch metadata improvements in their context as student / researcher experience improvements.

13. Analysis using VuFind
Counts from “facet filtering” helps to expose problems with metadata…

14. 98,994 country of publication 4,122 language codes 2,133 date codes
Here are some highlights of recent improvements to data (as of 29 October 2013).
Further examples include:
Invalid 006.
Blank characters in the leader.
No dates present in the 008.
041 fields with language codes run together.
We identified and updated about 105,000 problem codings in records already.

15. Language coding example
Here is a language coding example from across the Bloomsbury College partners.
Of total 2.4M records, coded undetermined in 008

16. Success factors

17. Technology & coding
Cloud hosting is a serious option – and a cloud hosted platform needs a stable and robust IT infrastructure. This will be based on enterprise IT approaches rather than libraryland approaches.
2. Interoperation with existing systems – there are essential campus systems to interoperate with that current-generation LMS doesn’t do very well:
Finance systems
Student records
Online sales
3. Open and extensible. The platform must be open and extensible for future work. Some of our functional spec is a bit aspirational – but the good thing is we know we can build it in to OLE later. Working with a development partner to do coding on an OSS system means this is actually feasible, whereas often with closed vendors you find you can’t even buy it. Much of this openness is most immediately relevant for our work on discovery

18. Workflow analysis
We look at the next-gen as a change to redefine staff workflows and as such the project has hired a business analyst to look at this…
Example of Post-It note exercise at SOAS recently to unpack ‘how to catalogue a book’ an example. Much more complicated than one would think.

19. appreciation
LMS
As I’ve said our view of the LMS is that it is an enterprise system and we need to raise its profile at HEI level, we do this by engaging:
University and College SMT. OLE exists as part of a Kuali ecosystem including financials, student records – lots of potential for additional Kuali components as a good choice in future.
University IT essential from early on, so much of our LMS success hinges on IT infrastructure like networking and this will only become more important if we host in the cloud.
Records managers especially for data protection issues.
University procurement team
Conceptually this is similar to ideas we heard from UEL at their Alma Day event earlier in 2013.

20. Questions andrew.preater@london.ac.uk @preater www.blms.ac.uk
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