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 and second quarterly update can also be found on Confluence which includes our charge and deliverables.

Our charge specifies that this project team will disband no later than April 2023. As such, this is our last quarterly report. However, a final overall report on the work this group has completed throughout its term is expected in the coming months as well. An initial discussion of some of our expected recommendations can be found at the end of this report.

Progress

In December, our team continued to create test orders based on fiscal data from Q1 of FY23 as well as starting initial research on creating invoices in the Network Zone. We started working primarily in the production environment in order to enter invoice and order data that we could later use with Analytics. 

Our team submitted a proposal that one use of the extra CDL funding be directed to hire a premium consultant from Ex Libris. We envision that an Ex Libris consultant will be able to provide more customized recommendations and suggest better network zone optimizations than what we currently have via Ex Libris support and the existing documentation. In preliminary conversation with Ex Libris, this service will cover 40 hours over a period of 12 months. This proposal was accepted and finalizing the agreement for hiring the consultant is in progress. 

In January, our team continued to test entering order and invoice data into production and continued brainstorming the best way to transfer all needed information from the existing spreadsheets into Alma. One output of our testing was the recommendation that CDL Acquisitions should create brief bib records as needed. This allows more flexibility for when inventory will never exist, may not exist immediately, or as needed to keep CDL’s order records organized. We created a decision page for Resource Management to review, offer feedback, and approve. We've also started writing order and invoice documentation for CDL Acquisitions staff. 

The rest of January was filled with additional research such as a discussion of the fiscal rollover options, optimizing the display of license terms in Primo VE, and troubleshooting unexpected Alma behaviors.

In February we reviewed our charge and workplan and reviewed the work we hope to finish prior to the end of our charge. Given the complexity of CDL Acquisition orders, we determined that we will not have time to do a comprehensive mapping of fields from the existing "payments and projections" and payment documents to Alma. That said, CDL Acquisitions will be in a much better position to start working in Alma in FY24 if current continuing orders are all entered into Alma prior to the start of July. As such, our group recommends that CDL Acquisitions attempt to get "skeleton" order records into Alma before the end of June. These skeleton records will include resource and fund information but may not include all the comprehensive notes that are available on the current spreadsheets. Our group met with Miranda Bennett, CDL's Director of Shared Collections, to brainstorm options for moving this plan forward. 

Our project team also had some member changes in February. We shifted our focus from creating orders and invoices to trying to use the associated data in Analytics. Lisa Wong (UCSC) has joined our group and is working with us during our Wednesday meeting times to consult on Analytics capabilities and brainstorm ideas on the best way to transcribe the current acquisitions spreadsheets into Alma reports.

Challenges

Ex Libris documentation and timely support responses continue to be a challenge. For example, back in the fall our group had evaluated options for campuses to place orders on CDL resources. One option is for campuses to create IZ orders off of NZ Inventory. However, we discovered that sometimes campuses were not seeing the order link appear in Alma as expected. We spent an excessive amount of time in January reviewing the documentation and communicating with support researching this issue. Ex Libris support provided an initial hypothesis which we were able to disprove via extended testing. The ticket has been sent to Ex Libris Development for further review, and our team continues to troubleshoot & test this issue.

The staffing challenges in CDL Shared Collections continue to put pressure on our CDL Shared Collection colleagues and exacerbate knowledge gaps. Our team continues to compensate for this by seeking flexible options that can be adapted as new information is learned. 

In addition, our campus electronic resource expert is on leave for the remaining project time. Fortunately, most of our electronic resource specific work has been completed at this point. Rather than bring a new campus electronic resource member up to speed, we decided to instead focus on adding an analytics expert to our team. 

Back in December our group recommended hiring an Ex Libris consultant to assist with our project team's work. We appreciate how promptly Günter Waibel and Erik Mitchell approved this suggestion. However, our team did not fully understand how long the procurement part of the process would take. We were initially hoping this team would have ample time working with the consultant before our team was discharged. At this point, that looks unlikely. However, we believe that CDL Shared Collections will still benefit from having an Ex Libris Network Zone consultant available to assist with particularly tricky scenarios.

Looking Forward to Our Final Report

Every member on our team has invested countless hours of time to keep moving this project forward. That said, there is still a lot of work left for CDL Shared Collections to do as informed by the research of this group. We initially thought there would be extensive harmonization needs between the NZ and IZs and that turns out not to be the case. 

Instead, we are strongly considering a limited continuation of this group from April to June with fewer meetings and a tight focus on providing any needed assistance to getting FY23 orders into Alma before FY24. This will balance group member's other time commitments while still being available for consultation with CDL Shared Collections. Group members may also be available for one-off meetings such as if campus feedback is needed when talking to the Ex Libris consultant.

We also plan to recommend that the CDLNZ-PT Slack channel continues and current team members continue to have access.This will allow CDL staff to quickly consult and brainstorm with campus experts who are already familiar with CDL's processes.