| 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. |
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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. |
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| 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?
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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)
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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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