It was May when I last posted a blog. At that time we were deep into a lockdown. Deja vu all over again, here we are once again in lockdown, albeit (who uses that word?) less restrictive in both scope and geography. Still doing jigsaw puzzles, still NOT cutting Janice’s hair. Life lived large, for sure.

In this post:

• Steering and Advisory Committees
• Aleph cleanup
• Central Discovery Index

Implementation Steering and Advisory Committees
The Implementation Steering Committee, responsible for the overall implementation process and for keeping their institutions informed, has met twice since October and the Advisory group resumed their bi-weekly meetings at the same time. The minutes for Steering Committee (which includes updates from the Advisory group) can be found on the Alma page: https://www.novanet.ca/members/alma/steering-committee-minutes/

Aleph Cleanup
Due to Covid related staff issues and the general summer slowdown, most of the Alma related Aleph cleanup was suspended over the summer. Work resumed in September and the small working groups, lead by the Implementation Advisory Group, have started meeting again. They have been busy cleaning up things collection codes, old orders, separating print and electronic holdings, fixing record formats and the like. A full list of cleanup jobs in the queue and those that are completed can be seen at: https://www.novanet.ca/clean-up-reports/

Central Discovery Index
Although this isn’t technically an Alma topic, it is something that was developed for Alma and is now available to SFX/Primo sites, like us. It gives us some insight into how Alma will handle activation of journal packages and resolving the record discovered in Primo and the link through to the actual article.

Our resolver, SFX, has always had its own index of packages that staff would manage to reflect their electronic holdings. In addition, Primo also had its own index that staff would manage to make their collections discoverable. Staff would have to update data in both places. As an off shoot of Alma, Ex libris has worked to combine these two indexes into one. We have access to the new CDI now and are working with SMU and Acadia to establish best practices and procedures so that we can transition everyone to the new index by end of term. Harvard Libraries have a good, brief explanation of the improvements that come with the CDI here

And that’s it for this update. Any question, drop me a line.

Cheers,
Bill