Overview

The CDLNZ Project Team was formed to help operationalize the work of CDL Shared Collections in the Alma Network Zone (NZ), with a particular focus on the CDL Acquisitions workflows. Our initial kickoff meeting occurred at the end of May. Our meeting notes can be found on our Confluence space. Our first quarterly update can also be found on Confluence which includes our charge and deliverables.

Progress

In September, we started by researching any CDL/UCSD financial aspects we would need to keep in mind when creating workflows for Alma, noting that CDL Shared Collections coordinates with UCSD campus and library support and systems including UCSD's Oracle financial system. We also learned that the UCSD Oracle integration with NZ Alma would not happen this year as it is a project that still needs to be coordinated with key UCSD stakeholders. We spent a significant amount of time researching potential ledger and fund structures in the NZ sandbox environment. We also created basic test orders and started looking at how the information from our current payment & projection spreadsheets and other recharge documentation could be migrated into Alma. The inventory subteam also created sample NZ inventory, and identified potential order options, for campuses to test

In October, our main group finalized and distributed the order testing documents to campuses. This testing allowed campuses to see the pros and cons of various methods for attaching their IZ order records to NZ bibs or inventory. We also discussed what additional information we would need to make our funding recommendation. We tested vendor distribution using the Distribute Network Acquisition Changes to Members job in the sandbox and then, once we could verify behavior, created a decision page acknowledging that NZ vendors must be shared to support license functionality but should not be edited by campuses. This was subsequently implemented in production. By this point, we felt we had enough information from our prior testing that we could create a work plan for the rest of our tasks.

In November, we spent time testing and documenting license behavior in the Network Zone, and tested sharing NZ licenses with campuses. We identified specific areas for CDL to work on cleaning up their license records in the NZ before licenses are shared broadly with campus IZs and clean up work that can be done afterward, as well. We also reviewed campus feedback from the ordering options and created a document summarizing the responses as well as some of the CDLNZ project team's initial recommendations. We created a funding recommendations subteam to parallelize our work which has been meeting weekly. We have also created funds and ledgers in production and have started populating it with test orders based on fiscal data from Q1 of FY23.

Challenges

Unfortunately, most of the challenges we identified in our first quarterly report still remain issues.

The lack of Ex Libris documentation continues to be a challenge. While the documentation often provides a general overview, it rarely documents the expected interactions between the Network Zone and Institutional Zones. Even when it does, the documentation can be incorrect or misleading. Ex Libris support is also rarely able to give us definitive answers. All of this means that we continue to spend a large amount of time testing to determine product functionality.

One added challenge to our tests is that there is no Analytics for the sandbox. Alma Analytics is an important part of our expected workflow and we anticipate that it will play a major role in facilitating information sharing between CDL and the campuses. However, we can only test Analytics in the production environment. This means that we cannot start testing Analytics related workflows until we are sure we understand Alma behavior well enough that we will not inadvertently cause issues in the production environment.

We also learned this quarter that the integration between Oracle and NZ Alma will not be happening this fiscal year. CDL staff will need to enter duplicate work in Alma to reflect cost share encumbrances and expenditures until the integration has been completed.

The staffing challenges in CDL Shared Collections also continue. Our CDL Shared Collections members are spending a significant amount of time working on this group. However, because of staffing constraints, the CDLNZ project team must sometimes make a best guess about how to implement a specific workflow. For this reason, the CDLNZ project team is taking an iterative approach toward establishing acquisitions workflows in Alma, knowing that improvements will continue to be made as CDL Shared Collections returns to full staffing and gains collective experience in Alma.

Next Quarter Goals

We are hoping that the CDLNZ project team will be able to finish the majority of our work in the next quarter. Our current work plan can be found on Confluence. In December we plan to advance our recommendation to use funds allocated for additional project support. In January we plan to create a larger set of sample data in production, testing Alma Analytics capabilities, and document workflow processes and step-by-step documentation. In February, we will solicit feedback from relevant stakeholders as to the proposed workflows we created in January. We also expect to schedule informational sessions starting in March for CDL and campuses to present Network Zone acquisitions data based on Analytics reports. Subsequent workshop sessions are planned for campuses to become more familiar with ordering options, including searching.