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2023-03-21 FOLIO Implementers Meeting Notes

2023-03-21 FOLIO Implementers Meeting Notes

Owned by Tara Barnett

Date

Recording

TK

Attendees

TK

Recommended Resources and Pre-Reads

  • ?

Agenda

  • Housekeeping
  • Cutover Processes
    • how long did you pause circulation or ordering or cataloging or other functions?
    • what kind of communication did you do to patrons?
    • did you maintain a view-only instance of your legacy ILS during cutover?
    • Cornell slides
  • Closing
    • Any actions or follow through?

Notes

Time

Topic

Notes


Michelle: Stanford going live with FOLIO in August, been planning their cutover, want to learn from others how you did it, including: handling patron-facing activities, when to stop cataloging, how/whether to keep legacy ILS available.

See Debra's (Cornell) slides above for their full cutover plan.
  • Go-live was planned around fiscal year cutover (very complicated to do otherwise). 
  • Paused circ for 2 weeks. We let access service people REST before the move. We used offline circulation for a week (app they wrote) (we've shared the code repository)
  • Data left behind: Closed loans, a lot of request data (have to look at legacy data snapshot)
  • Migration of legacy data into LDP 6-7 months after cutover. 
  • Coudln't do train-the-trainer because of the pandemic and closed libraries + Iris for testing was delayed --> Continual opportunities to get hands-on + continual and varied communication content and channels.

How to manage patron expecatations - what was communicated?
  • Debra: Wrote articles + informed student assembly & faculty senat. Timing: not a lot of students on site, but research is active during summer. We communicated lots.
  • Kathy (Douglas College): Worried about links to course materials breaking, so we will be communicating a lot about that.

Heather: planning: EBSCO says: If all data provided Thursday night or Friday, only cutoff 2-3 days, rather than 2-3 weeks. Is that actually doable?
  • Size probably makes a difference. 
  • Heather (Otis College of Art and Design) - we did over the week-end, but with less than 50.000 items. Timed it for deadest time (1st week August). But we didn't use Acq in our old system.
  • Depends on whether you're self-hosted or not.

Heather: Make sure staff is trying out FOLIO, at all levels (and not just that they say they are) - I would have had more trainings. 

Did you maintain a view-only version of your legacy system during cutover?
  • Shaking heads.
  • Heather: One avaiable to staff, but not to patrons.
  • Kathy: Will keep ours around, just in case, for the few months until the licence ends.
  • Not everyone has that option; any strategies to mitigate that?

Darsi: Can anyone describe something that went wrong, and what you did about it?
  • Heather: We lost all our authorities (coz of legacy system, not because of FOLIO), now I'm hiring someone to deal with that.

How much buffer time to plan in case things go wrong?
  • Stanford thinks that data can be migrated in 1 week, but they are asking for a 2 week slot, just in case.

How many iterations of test migration before going live?
  • Kathy: 2 to 3 times
  • Debra: We did dozens, in chunks (we were very early adopters) (several things in FOLIO had not been built for the scale of Cornell)

How were staff involved in testing the migration?
  • Debra: Jenn Colt slept, eat and breathed data import for months before, with our hosting provider, iteratively testing the data imports (i.e. EBSCO loading the data).
  • Heather: We had more problems with the FOLIO-EDS - tests there happened many times.

Other integrations to consider? A punch-list that people used?
  • Debra: We tried all our integrations (we have many).  
  • Kathy: We'd love everything to work on our go-live date, but that's not possible, we got to choose, so we're focusing on our basic, bread&butter functions and workflows. 

How do you sort out, what you can live without?
  • Kathy: E.g. we are going live with Nolana; Orchid will give us something we need, but until then we will go back to manual acquisition. We are really involving staff: "Let's figure out how you can do your job", "What parts can't work", "What can we work around".
  • Kathy: Training is not just about a fuction, but how do you do your job with the functions that FOLIO offers. 
  • Tara: That's the life with FOLIO: Adapting around waiting for things you want to be implemented.

On the cutover event: What was the communication between you and your hosting providers/ you and the people doing the implementation?
  • Debra: It was like mission control (i.e. constant live communication), we had a dedicated private Slack channel with constant communication (20h/day) up until a month afterwards.
  • Heather: With ByWater, they had meetings every other day running up to the event, and emailing. We still have weekly meetings, to check it's all going ok. Soon going to biweekely.
  • Debra: In absence of communication, people make stuff up, so we overcommunicated + don't sugarcoat things that don't work. 

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