Executive Director’s Report: Fall 2007 User Groups

Consortium of MnPALS Libraries
User Group Meeting
October 11 & 12, 2007
Prepared by Stephen Elfstrand

INTRODUCTION

Please allow me to introduce myself. I’m Stephen Elfstrand, the new Executive Director of PALS and I started August 1. For those of you that didn’t see me when I interviewed, my previous position was as Head of Systems and Circulation at the University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire, where I was tenured as an Associate Professor in the McIntyre Library. At UWEC we ran Voyager, SFX, MetaLib and ILLiad, so Aleph is new territory for me.

However, I have been involved in library systems since my internship with IBM while I was in Library School at the University of Texas at Austin. Previous positions include Automation Librarian at the University of Wisconsin – River Falls, Technical Service Manager at the James J. Hill Reference Library, and Sr. Reference Librarian at Unisys Defense Systems Division. In all I have more than 25 years in the library automation field.

I have a previous connection to PALS as well. I was an undergraduate here at Minnesota State University, Mankato and worked in the music library as PALS was being created. Later, when working for Unisys Corporation, I advocated for the use of PALS for the Unisys Corporate libraries in North America, which we did. While at James J. Hill, I worked closely with Dale Carrison and we migrated to PALS; I believe we were the first private library in PALS.

So it was with great interest that I greeted the announcement for the Executive Director position. Managing a large library system, back in my home state, in the town where I was an undergraduate, seemed like the ideal next step in my career. In addition, I was so impressed with the staff I met while interviewing, I thought to myself “these are my kind of people”. So it was with real pleasure that I accepted the job when it was offered to me.

As I said, I have a lot to learn and I am looking forward to meeting and working with the MnPALS Consortium as well as others in the State and region. I hope that having worked in another state for the last 12 years, I can offer some new ideas, skills and approaches to the MnPALS Consortium. As I mentioned, I have experience with SFX and MetaLib and perhaps we can think about how the PALS office can deliver new services such as OpenURL to all of our customers.

PALS ORGANIZATIONAL STUDY

Another important consideration is whether the PALS office is structured in such a way as to be able to deliver services as efficiently and effectively as possible. To help us sort this out, a consultant, Mark Scipioni, Senior Management Consultant with the Management Analysis and Development Division of the Minnesota Department of Administration was hired. He interviewed the PALS staff, consortium members and some people from other large consortium offices. Afterwards, he spoke with the staff and presented his findings orally and we all discussed some ideas that came out of the study. The final report should be available in a few weeks and we will post it on the web site for all to see. It should spark some interesting discussion; perhaps we could start a Forum on this and get some additional reaction at the February User Council and Executive Committee meetings.

ALEPH UPDATE

The provision of ongoing support of the Aleph ILS remains the primary focus for the PALS office. The PALS staff strives to provide the best service possible. Recent accomplishments include the completion of testing of the inventory module and the creation of a “how to” document for its use (KB #3199). The e-mailing of notices is now working. We continue to work with Ex Libris on the specifications for Aleph ILL direct requests to OCLC, and between Aleph and the gateway using VDX.

In addition, I’d like to announce a program of site visits by myself and members of the support team. That way we can get to know you individually and in person, and it will give us a chance to hear from you first hand. I’ve asked each member of the support unit to visit two or three libraries every year; a couple of these have already occurred, but more will follow.

I expect to be visiting many libraries each year and have made several already. So far, I have been to Southwest Minnesota State University, South Central College, and Bethany Lutheran College. I attended the MnSCU Library Leadership meeting in St. Cloud and I’ve been to my first User Council and Executive Committee meetings. I have invitations to meet with the CALCO group and our friends in the St. Cloud region later in October. But this is just the beginning! Beyond the consortium itself, I’ve met with Bill DeJohn and attended the MINITEX Advisory Council where I had the opportunity to meet people from North and South Dakota, and CLIC among others.

Another important issue is the finalization of the support agreement between PALS and Ex Libris. To that end we had a meeting with Robert Mercer, the President of Ex Libris North America, and Don Muccino, the head of World Wide Support. Representing PALS were Linda Richter, Todd Digby, and I. The negotiations were cordial and businesslike and we are waiting for a counter-proposal from Ex Libris. It was good to be able to raise important issues once again with top management. A couple of other pieces of news came out of the meeting. First, Ex Libris has committed to test new releases in a multi-ADM environment. Secondly while they continue planning for the release of the successor product to both Aleph and Voyager, currently labeled URM for Universal Resource Management, they will continue to support both products indefinitely.

We are completing the installation of new hardware for Aleph. We have moved production of version 17 to the new server, which has twice the processing power and three times the memory as the old one, and we are seeing better performance as a result. While the upgraded hardware for the development server has also been installed, some work on the software side remains, though it should be completed in the next week or two.

ALEPH version 18

With the new hardware in place, we can, with confidence, begin the process of upgrading to Aleph version 18. The PALS office was asked at the Spring 2006 User Group Meeting to investigate the implications of a move to version 18 and a summary of this investigation is on the PALS web site. The PALS staff presented a proposal and draft timeline for the upgrade to version 18 to the User Council at the September 10 meeting. It was approved there and forwarded to the Executive Committee who also approved it.

Although we had hoped to go live with version 18 over the semester break, that will not happen. The earliest date that we could get for the installation of version 18 in the test instance was October 15-17, which set back the whole schedule by about one month. On the other hand the ILL conversion kit has been made available much earlier than expected.

A draft timeline is included in the user group documents and I will highlight a few of the major milestones. They are subject to change depending on what we discover as we actually begin to work with the software.

Key word re-indexing: November 22 – 23, Thanksgiving
Install of version 18 in a test instance October 15-17
ILL test conversion November
ARC installation & begin testing November
Training January
Aleph version 18 in production February
ILL conversion February
ARC live April?
Authorities Late Spring
Total Re-indexing After Authorities processing

The one major change in version 18 is the move of the ILL module from the web to the client, and I believe that the ILL folks are enthusiastic about that. We have committed to support Media Booking starting in version 18; Cathy Colby, our Support and Training Coordinator has agreed to take this on. Also coming is the long awaited installation of an end-user reporting tool, cleverly named ARC (Aleph Reporting Center). In addition, there is new authorities functionality in version 18. A summary of the main features for version 18 is included in the User Group documents.

Ex Libris assures us, and conversations with others using version 18 confirm that the change will not require anywhere near the level of effort by the libraries that the move from 15 to 17 did. So, to quote the advice from the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy: “Don’t panic”! Looking forward to version 19, we will see the incorporation of Course Reserves into the client.

COMMUNICATION

One message we heard at the User Council and Executive Committee is the need for the PALS office to communicate more effectively with the membership. Some efforts were underway already such as the installation of the Wiki and Forum software. We’ve been asked to consolidate the discussion list with the migration list and eliminate the subgroup lists since there is little traffic on them. I hope our site visit program will contribute to this as well. In addition an ad hoc task force has been set up to look at communication issues. If you have ideas as to how we can keep you better informed and what communication channels you prefer, please send them to Mary Ann Greenwald, or myself.

I know that I have a major responsibility in this area as well, and I plan to be sending updates to the discussion list and the library directors regularly. Please feel free to call or email me if you wish. Communication is always an issue: too much (irrelevant) information is as bad as not enough information; we all receive too many emails to cope with, different people prefer different channels, etc. So, striking the right balance between too much and too little, targeting the right messages to the right audience at the right time, and using the appropriate communication channels is the art of communication. What could be easier?

BEYOND THE ILS

Beyond Aleph, we have ordered some new Linux machines, which are faster and have much more memory that the current machines running the LibProxy, Forum, Wiki, and mailing list software. These applications will be transitioned over to the new hardware over the next three months and will be joined by our new proxy offering: EZ Proxy. EZ Proxy offers significant advantages over LibProxy, most importantly is supported! In addition it can handle multimedia objects more effectively and if the library wishes, can authenticate against the domain controller using LDAP. This means that users could use their email user id and password rather than the very long barcode to gain access to proxy services. Needless to say with all this activity, the Work Plan has been updated and is linked from each of the subsystem agendas.

In September the PALS staff and I met with Lettie Bennet, our Ex Libris sales representative who came to visit us here in Mankato. She showed us other Ex Libris offerings such as SFX (OpenURL) and MetaLib (Federated Search). I think we should consider an OpenURL product for the whole consortium as a high priority. She also showed us Primo, which is their “discovery tool”. It pre-processes information found in local data repositories such as the library catalog to provide fast searching and retrieval, and guided navigation with faceted results. She shared some pricing information for some of these products with us.

Another interesting development is from OCLC and is called WorldCat.Local. It has guided navigation and a simple search interface that displays records in groups, with local library records first, followed by other consortium member libraries, and then the whole WorldCat holdings. This could be a useful way to create a virtual union catalog among libraries even if they are on disparate systems. Information on pricing should be available in December and I think it would be a good idea to see what consortium pricing for MnPALS might cost.

OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE

Dissatisfaction with library software, vendor support and slow development is widespread throughout the library community. As a result we are seeing a surge of interest in the open source movement. As you know the public libraries in Georgia have had a great success with an open source library system (Evergreen). Another example is Koha from an academic consortium in New Zealand. I attended the “Future of the ILS” conference in Illinois, which just confirmed to me that open source may well present a way forward for library systems. In Minnesota, the CLIC consortium is looking closely at the open source option also. Perhaps there are some opportunities for PALS to play a role in state-wide and regional open source cooperative efforts.

PALS is “dipping its toes in the water” of open source already. The Ex Libris Product Primo is based on open source components, which they have enhanced and marketed as proprietary software. Al Rykhus has been investigating these open source products, SOLR and Lucene, and has come up with the very interesting alpha version of a discovery tool, which he will demo at the User Group Meeting on Thursday. Sneak previews for Al’s efforts have met with very positive comments and we would like to see if we can go to the next level and provide our member libraries with a beta version of this tool in early spring, soon after the version 18 upgrade.

CONCLUSION

I want to thank the PALS staff and the consortium for the warm welcome I have received and pledge that I will do my best to take PALS to the next level. While still maintaining a strong emphasis on the ILS, together we will explore new approaches and offer new services to our users. Always mindful of our goal: to help our clients succeed in their academic, work and personal lives.