2021-08-31 Meeting Notes

25,000 students; 12 physical and 8 virtual libraries; 8.5 million volumes and 1.7 million e-books, ~50 Tech Services people, 100-150 Access Services people

Wanted to go live in 2020 but delayed.  After that decision, they got serious about categorizing JIRAs, focussing on their Showstoppers.

Had 17 and worked through them, bringing them to the attention of the community and worked on some themselves.  Single record import was a critical one.

Integrations were critical:

• Partnered with FOLIO for some, outside vendors for others (such as Caiasoft)
• For ILL - borrowing, close to lending
• Some hiccups along the way but see improvement daily
• Fewer complications than anticipated

Data migration:

• Planned for migration 6-8 months before implementation
• Worked internally to make decisions about data to migrate
• Embedded as many Voyager identifiers as possible
• Created detailed plan for downtime during migration
• Shut down Circ a few days early - needed time to rewrite procedures and train
• Weak spots: Data that got less practice had more problems
• Staff training and engagement:
• Communication - good, bad & ugly; weekly emails and frequent demos
• Training - demos; training by functional area
• Supporting staff to become SMEs
• Created their own Slack channel
• Used info in the FOLIO wiki as well, Tips & Tricks, recorded demos

Going well: Circ, system uptime, automation of invoice / voucher exports, patron import/updates, remote storage inventory automation

Not going well:

Check out times

~24,000 students, 45 FT employees, previously in a shared Sierra implementation

Went live with EDS & ERM January 2020, main operations in June 2020

Lots of migration tests, heavy staff involvement in bugfests

For them biggest change was lack of an OPAC, lots of training and publicity about EDS

Performed FY rollover in June

Went live this summer

One of 30 Cambridge colleges - 1000 students, 180 Fellow, entirely print collection

• 1 lead implementer + 2 staff
• Library senior management only was involved
• Planning: project management; testing; transition
• Managing change: onboarding of staff; training
• Decision making: small team was easier; change to revise workflows and policies

Fear and risk?

• Main: exporting inexperience and possible loss of data, mitigated by having hand held ? and making many backup files
• Smaller: will we think of everything?  Huge # of decisions to make during and intense process - Do the best you can and fix stuff later

Data cleanup - used Backstage for help

Training - early exposure to FOLIO; specific training when required

Documenting deciions and workflow changes

2 months post golive: issues to deal with include

• Fiscal rollover problems
• Best way to update discover VuFind
• How to export large batches of records
• How to do global updates
• How to import student data
• Print serials management

Keys to success:

• Implementation team - EBSCO
• Lead implementer released from some other tasks to focus on FOLIO
• Openness to rethinking workflows and adapting to available functionality
• Relatively friction-free decision making process

Went live last summer,

First Year with FOLIO in production:

• Streamlined FOLIO deployment & data migration process - did it themselves
• Good UI, staff liked it and found it easy to learn FOLIO
• LDP tool and the repository of queries created by the reporting SIG have been lifesavers.  Able to continue adding, editing & marking record for deletion in batch because of them
• Powerful APIs:
• Banner integration: Identity Management Connection App; Invoice Integration App
• Google Apps Script: add-ons for Google sheets, docs, slides, integrate with FOLIO APIs well
  • Ideal place for reports and workflows, built-in scheduling tool
  • Inventory app: scan in a barcode, mark item as inventories on the spreadsheet, checks the FOLIO status and writes to it
  • Invoice Masher takes a spreadsheet and creates invoices in bulk
• Productive and pleasant relations with Index Data, host

Collaborative FOLIO Community

Successful FY rollover - had to address some data issues but mostly smooth

Question: do you have test servers?

• Lehigh - yes, have a test instance
• Missouri St - yes, do a dry run in test for each release
• Cornell - same, pay extra attention to things that are supposed to be fixed in the release, in their internal wiki keep track of these

Hosting/migration service providers - lessons learned, not sales pitch

Print Serials management - maybe a conversation with the PO (Dennis Bridges) and maybe AMB

Communication with university community