Adventures in Alma – Issue #10
In this post we will continue our salute to the Working Groups and Committees. Up this week is the Steering Committee and the Technical Advisory Group.
But first, a timeline update.
Friday the 15th marked the beginning of the Aleph Technical Services freeze. You’ll recall that this freeze is to allow ExL time to extract, transform and migrate our Acquisitions and Cataloguing data. At this point all work in Aleph in those areas must stop. I’ve had several of you ask if it is OK to look things up in Aleph without actually doing anything to change the data. The answer is a resounding – NO! Even just doing something like looking up an order makes Aleph write data to the Oracle database and could mess up the extract. So hands off.
Next up in the timeline is the Alma configuration freeze, which begins the morning of April 27. At this point any and all work in Alma will be stopped until we go Live on May 17th. By end of day on Tuesday April 26 you must be finished your institutional training because beginning on the 27th ExL will be loading our data into Alma.
Now on to the salute part.
Alma Steering Committee
The Steering Committee was created to be the institutional representation for the project. They were expected to be well informed about Alma and to be the voice of their institution at the project management level. All the members took the Alma Essentials training at the very least; many went even further. The office has relied heavily on these folks to be the liaison with their institutions, taking questions back to the appropriate people at their sites and ensuring timely answers made it back to the us and ExL. At your end these are the people who kept you updated on what was going on in the project. This was and is a very time consuming and sometimes frustrating role, so thanks to all of them.
Emily Cooke, AST
Sandy Dwyer, Dal
Leigh Gagnier/Debbie Costelo, NSCC
Jason Lee/Catherine Arseneau, CBU
Anne LePage/Dianne Keeping, MTA
Tracy Lenfesty/Janet Hathaway, Kings
Amy Lorencz, SMU
Pamela Maher, USA
Lelland Reed, NSCAD
Jennifer Richard/Roni Fenwick, ACAD
Sandra Sawchuk, MSVU
Margaret Vail, StFX
Technical Advisory Working Group
This was the first group formed way back in 2020. The purpose of this group was twofold – one, to identify and work on Aleph cleanup projects and two, to provide subject area expertise in the main functional areas (Circ, Cat, Acq) to the office and the Steering Committee. It’s difficult to overestimate how much work these people and their associated teams saved all of us in the cleanup process. As their work morphed into providing advice and recommendations to the Steering Committee and office on configuring Alma, they expanded their membership to include the three Service Group chairs. We certainly wouldn’t be as well off as we are now without all of their efforts.
Corinne Gilroy (MSVU)/Karen Tobin (CBU) – Access/Fulfillment
Terri Winchcombe (SMU)/Brenda McKenna (StFX) – Acquisitions
Ian Fraser (NSCC)/Adam Keylor (MSVU)/Amy Lorencz (SMU) – Cataloguing/Resources
As I’ve said before, take a moment and thank these people for all the work they are and will be doing.
Thanks for reading.