A briefing from Ex Libris on new initiatives and topics
Melanie Fitter, Professional Services Director APAC region, Ex Libris
Alma UI – looking at painpoints, have various systemwide tools in progress. Feedback messages have been released. Working on improving menus, choosing multiple facets, improving configuration of mapping and code tables. Working on accessibility.
Metadata Editor – has always been a source of complaint, so working on navigation, accessibility of tools, more easily working between different areas, add records to an editing queue from search. Some features will start trickling through starting from the end of the year. Old will be gone around mid-2020.
Known Issues Operator role gives access to known issues list which shows high-priority issues/bugs with a fix date (quarter or the specific monthly release) associated with them. So can search there then either be reassured or create your own case.
CDI – lots of benefits with latest hardware architecture, faster update cycle, single-activation, merged records instead of grouped records. About 92% permalinks will work after the move… In Alma there’ll be a new CDI tab on collection records. Rollout – Alma/PrimoVE moving Q4 2019 – Q2 2020, while Primo/SFX moving Q1 2020 – Q4 2020
COUNTER 5 – hopefully testing done by end of year and launched to everyone by Jan 2020. Both COUNTER 4 and 5 running in parallel until 4 phased out ‘eventually’. In the vendor record > Usage data tab can add a SUSHI account and choose whether it’s 4 or 5.
Provider Zone content loading – currently vendors provide Ex Libris data, and ExL does normalisation etc etc then it’s loaded – this causes a bottleneck. So providing a place where vendors can upload their own content. Based on their APIs, letting vendors load content straight into collections/portfolios/MARC straight from their own data. This should be seamless from library’s point of view – on the collection we’ll just see eg “Managed by IEEE Xplore”. 5 intro partners: Proquest, IEEE, Sage, Alexander Street Press, Taylor and Francis – in production at start of 2020.
Resource Sharing – looking at creating a new next-gen system. Focus on patron value, library efficiency, shared holding index; also including search for libraries nearby. Estimate of due time. General release end 2020 and at end 2021 ability to add non-Alma institutions as lenders/borrowers.
DARA – plan to add recommendations for high demand item purchase, cataloguing (eg duplicates), more e-collection portfolio.
Next Gen analytics – moving towards data visualisation using OBI 12.