Adventures in Alma – Issue #3

Here we are in mid-May, still in lock-down and I’m sick of it! You?

Corona-boredom has set in. We are doing things at home to keep it at bay. Started doing jigsaw puzzles – thanks for lending us a couple Ruth; sorry for spilling beer on one ☹. Janice convinced me to take the electric clippers to her hair – with just the results you would have predicted. Regular stuff we are all doing.

One good thing is our work on the Aleph cleanup and other Alma stuff is moving right along. Today’s post will cover:

  • Alma Implementation Steering Committee
  • Alma Implementation Advisory Group
  • Alma Implementation Working Groups
  • Aleph cleanup
  • Alma resources

Alma Implementation Steering Committee
I reported on the members of the Steering Committee in my last blog. You’ll recall that this group, with a rep from every institution, is charged with managing the overall implementation process. We had an initial meeting in early April and now have a regular monthly meeting on the 3rd Wednesday of every month.

Alma Implementation Advisory Group
The Group has been meeting every two weeks to continue management of the Aleph cleanup project. We also have a meeting set up with a couple of people from Ex Libris for next week. The purpose is to give us a better understanding of some of the migration/implementation details to help us with our cleanup jobs.

Alma Implementation Working Groups
Implementation Working Groups – A call was put out to staff in late March asking for people interested in serving on the various groups. We received lots of volunteers, so thanks to you all. Since our focus right now is to finish the Aleph cleanup, we decided to convene three groups (Access/Fulfillment; Acquisitions/Serials; Cataloguing/Metadata) in order to help with the ongoing cleanup projects. Other working groups will be convened as their areas of responsibility enter the implementation timeline.

The members of the working groups convened at this time are below. For most of these groups there were many more volunteers than positions. The Leads did their best to balance the experience level of the groups so we have a mix of experienced and not so experienced, while at the same time ensuring that membership is distributed amongst the institutions.

Members:
Access/Fulfillment
Corinne Gilroy (Lead, MSVU)
Pam Chase (Novanet)
Wilma Carty (ACAD)
Heather Gardner/Robin Allen (NSCC)
Karen Tobin (CBU)

Acquisitions/Serials/ERM
Terri Winchcombe (Lead, SMU)
Bill Slauenwhite (Novanet)
Brenda McKenna (StFX)
Caroline Power (CBU)
Erin Winchcombe (DAL)

Cataloguing/Metadata
Ian Fraser (Lead, NSCC)
Pam Chase (Novanet)
Elaine Christensen (StFX)
Adam Keylor (MSVU)
Chris MacDonald (SMU)

Aleph Cleanup
The Advisory Group, now with the help of the three Working Groups and existing Service Groups, have been making very good progress on the cleanup. A full list of completed, in progress and upcoming tasks can be found on the Alma page under Cleanup Reports (https://www.novanet.ca/clean-up-reports/). We are just getting down to tackling the really big jobs, the ones with 100,000 or more records. The Advisory Group will be thinking about how best to distribute the work involved in these big cleanup jobs. Stay tuned.

Alma Resources
Lastly, a reminder that we are updating the Alma resources on our Alma site as we discover or create them. The latest is the Alma Video Training Guide. Created by the folks at NSCC, it’s a complete list of the video courses in  “Getting to Know Alma” and “Alma Essentials” with a brief description and a link to each video. It’s a great resource for those of you poking around in the Alma Training site. Thanks NSCC!

That’s it for this post. Any suggestions, comments – drop me a line.

Stay healthy.
Bill

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