Rosemary Archondakis and Tracey Craddock, UWA

Talk for WAGUL – Wednesday 20th April 9:00 am

Rosemary Archondakis and Tracey Craddock, UWA

Reading list management

Goodmorning everybody, I am Tracey and this is Rosemary. We both work in the technical services area at UWA and our presentation this morning is on how we are currently managing our reading lists, we call it Course Materials Online, at UWA.I will be describing how we managed Course Materials Online up to the end of 2015 and Rosemary will talk on our current processes with the implementation of Alma.

CMO at UWA – the old and the new

We have both been working in technical services since 2008 and the system in use at this time for managing our reading lists was a product developed by HarvestRoad, known as HIVE. HIVE had been adopted for use by the Library in 2006 after a project to find a repository based reading list management system.

Hive was meant to enable our academicstaffto “take control” of their Course Material Online lists themselves.

They would review their list, adding & deleting items

If they couldn’t locate an item in the repository….

The academic could put in a request online. At this stage a digital item could also be attached for technical services staff to review before publishing. These requests would move into a workflow in date entered order for our staff to work on.

What actually happened though was….

Some academics were good at managing their own lists. Many found it too much work at a busy time and were able to have their own staff manage the list for them. Many academics gave a word document to our reader services staff and asked them to do all the reading list work, replicating the word document.

So what would we doin technical services….????

We would work on the online requests that came to us in a work queue.

We could indicate what stage each item in the queue was at. The workflow with HIVE was well organised and we could see at a glance the numbers of completed and un-actioned requests. This really helped with allocation of staff resources.

Possible copyright conflicts were identified and blocked automatically, a manual unblock could be done if the digital object was verified as okay.

The technical services team updatedthe metadata, linked to articles and attached digitised book chapters.

Items were then uploaded to the Reading List Management System for Academics and Students to view their reading lists.Academics had editing privileges for the front end of Hive and were able to arrange lists in groups, commonly in week order, but sometimes with specific headings.

The front end ofCourse Materials Online was made available to students/staff & academics by a separate interface.

This system however outlived its use by date.The Hive product had been sold and the new owner did not provide technical support-HIVE had become unreliable and regularly broke down. To have problems fixed we would have to negotiate with a former HarvestRoad IT specialist to spend time with our IT people.

Plans to replace the Millennium library management system coincided with us realising that Hive was no longer manageable and would have to be replaced. We decided not to renew the licenseas we believedthat Alma (our new Library Management System)would meet our requirements, especially with the promisedadd on module(Alma D) for managing digital items.

And so we began life with AlmaALMA

We began to use the Unified Resource Management System ALMA in 2015 to display Course Materials Online and make them discoverable within their own tab in OneSearch/Primo.

Although Alma didn’t have the functionality to fully manage the Course Materials Online We believed that the functionality that is currently in Leganto would be integrated into Alma..at this time Leganto wasn’t a separate system.

When we began using ALMA for CMO we created all the reading lists from the ground up. When we changed systems we had lost years of stored lists - it was a frantic time –we had to create hundreds of courses and lists writing the procedures as we went along.

We migrated the digital objects into a temporary storage area. DigiTool was chosen for this temporarily as we were already using it for the management of our online Theses. It will be necessary to migrate our storage again when ALMA D becomes available.

We were disappointed to find that we can’t link online articles directly from ALMA via OneSearch Primo to the CMO reading lists. Our current process requires us to create a brief bib record in Alma to link to Onesearch Primo. This appears to be unnecessary duplication when articles are available online however Lecturers wanted this service maintained so all required readings are displayed in the CMO list.

Since the commencement of the new ALMA system technical services staff have taken on many of the tasks that were previously done by the academics and reader services staff.

Requests for course lists and reading lists are now received via email from academics and librarians. Unlike HIVE, Alma does not have a workflow management process, the email inbox is being used for this purpose. Because individual emails contain many requests it is difficult to manage the workflow and obtain statistics of completed requests and those still in process.

These lists come in many different formats, some easy to manage, some very confusing, and some include the full unit outline with a general instruction to add the essential readings (easier said than done)!!!!!

Our job is to sort the lists, processing books, online articles, and digitisation requests. We now add books to lists and move books to High Demand within Alma, both tasks were previously done by reader services staff.

Requests for digital objects are currently emailed to our subject library for scanning. We are currently investigating ALMA’S digitisation workflow to make this process more efficient.

Apart from creating links to online articles we also create bib records for book extracts. These book extracts are uploaded via DigiTool: a very cumbersome and unwieldy procedure. A specialised reading list management system would streamline this process.

When adopting Alma for our CMO needs we believed that there would be better interoperability between Primo, DigiTool and Alma as they were all Ex Libris products.

Our main concerns are copyright management in Alma and the lack of digital repository storage.

The old system, Hive would alert us to potential copyright clashes. In Alma the user has to check the source and records to ascertain if any extracts from that source are already being communicated on CMO lists, then check pagination details and suppress or un-suppress these extracts as necessary.

The future

We don’t fully understand or know what the Alma system is capable of and we are continuing to research within the FAQs and online training tools provided, to discover more efficient ways to use ALMA. At the moment a digitising process is in the planning stages.

We are also undertaking an environmental scan, to evaluate various electronic management reserve systems such Talis Aspire, Leganto and E reserve which may better meet our CMO needs at UWA.