Step 5: Perspectives From Previous Migrations

Owned by Liana Giovando
Last updated: Aug 11, 2021 by Danielle Emon
3 min read

Many libraries and consortia have been down this road before us. We can learn from their experience and perspectives. This page includes:

Data cleaning hindsight - past experiences for review

Notes from Novanet

​​https://www.novanet.ca/adventures-in-alma-issue-2/

Cleanup Progress

The Advisory Group and members of the Acq, Cat and Access Service groups have been busy with the first round of Aleph Cleanup. As you’ll recall, the purpose of this work is to do as much as we can to the data in Aleph so that we’ll have less cleanup to deal with when we start on Alma.

Current cleanup projects include:

  • Barcodes that cannot be searched or scanned in Aleph (and probably Alma) because they contain symbols, spaces and other oddities.

  • Collections with multiple item statuses, these need to examined and edited so there is one collection per item status.

  • No Collection – item records without collection codes

  • Item Process Status report – these will be reviewed to identify item process statuses no longer in use and clean up records that have old item process statuses that may need to be removed or changed.

Clean up projects on the horizon:

  • Suppressed records clean up – we’ve learned that suppressed records in Aleph can be migrated to Alma but we need to identify if there suppressed records that do not need to be retained.

  • Unclosed Orders – Acquisitions Service Group are identifying what order statuses are used for closed order. We will then produce a report for all these orders for review.

  • Electronic/print records split – We are working on identifying bib records that have both electronic and print items.

Posted on November 27, 2020 by Bill Slauenwhite

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/

CARLI

89 institutions migrated from Voyager, went live in June, 2020.

CUNY

CUNY migrated from Aleph, 2020.

GALILEO INTERCONNECTED LIBRARIES (GIL)

This particular article about the University System of Georgia Alma/Primo implementation seems to offer some particularly insightful information for data cleanup, legacy practices and cleanup before go live and ‘what they would do differently:

Lee, J., & Frost, G. (2017). Manipulating Data and Moving Forward: Transitioning to a Shared Cataloging Environment. Collaborative Librarianship, 9(3), 215–. https://digitalcommons.du.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1351&context=collaborativelibrarianship

SUNY

SUNY Library Consortium went live in July, 2019, migrating from Aleph. What is interesting here, is that SUNY used a set of ‘Vanguard’ libraries to “help facilitate SUNY's development of the network zone and other consortial configurations,” prior to determining how all 60 SUNY institutions would migrate their data to Alma and Primo. What follows are links relevant to their data cleaning initiatives:

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

University of California has just recently gone live with Alma/Primo VE, with libraries migrating from WMS, III and Voyager. The following blog documents their data cleanup recommendations prior to Go-Live:

 

Implementation hindsight - past experiences for review

Session recordings from the SUNYLA Midwinter 2019, Moving to Alma/Primo VE: Hindsight is 20/20

https://sunyla.org/sunyla-midwinter-2019/ .

Sessions include:

  • Implementation, Looking Back: Best and Worst

  • Five Things We Wish We Knew Before We Migrated

  • Network Zone Analytics – What It Is and How Not to Ruin it for Everybody

  • Data Impurities and How to Outwit Them

  • Implementing Primo VE in a Consortial Environment: Finding the Balance

  • Alternative Coverage and Open Access Collections in Primo Central: Guidelines and Recommendations

  • Tech Services Work Orders that Really Work

  • Fund Structures in Alma

 

UC Santa Cruz - “Implementation Minus 40 Days: Considered Pragmatism Under Pressure”: https://escholarship.org/content/qt08m1b3gd/supp/ELUNA_-_Implementation_Minus_40_Days.pdf

 

COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY (CSU) & CONNECTICUT STATE COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES (CSCU)

This article documents two more academic implementations that may offer some additional insights for data cleanup, communications and general migration form completion.

D’Amato, K., & Erb, R. A. (2018). The Road from Millennium to Alma: Two Tracks, One Destination. The Serials Librarian, 74(1-4), 217–223. https://doi.org/10.1080/0361526X.2018.1428475