Third Party Applications: GOBI Dawn Smith Loyola Law School – Los Angeles

Introduction Enrollment – 1,315 Law School Students III Customer since 1992 Upgraded to Millennium in 1998 Became a Hosted site in August 2011

The Big Picture The law school is an autonomous entity within the Loyola Community. We have our own library budget, ILS, and collection development policy separate from our Main campus. In the past the selection of monographic titles was handled by professional library staff in monthly selection meetings. These selections were then entered into an Excel spreadsheet for approval and purchase. Talking about Monographic titles only. Not ebooks. However, in the last few years these meetings fell by the wayside and selection was left to only a couple of librarians who searched individual publisher catalogs and slip notifications.

This was a highly inefficient way of handling the selection process This was a highly inefficient way of handling the selection process. Duplication of work by the librarians doing the selecting and the technical services dept. An extremely high rate of human error due to the manual data entry required to create and update these documents.

Additional Issues Law schools nation wide are currently facing a financial crisis. Graduating students are unable to find gainful employment within the profession, so we are starting to see a decline in enrollment across the board. This downward trend has led to a call for severe spending cuts campus-wide to help lower the cost of law school for students, and to help boost the appeal of seeking a law degree in this current financial climate. With this financial crisis we have been fortunate not to lose any positions in the library, however, as staff retire some jobs will not be filled. We have been asked to make six figure cuts in our budget each year for the next 3 years. These cuts will most likely come from the book line of the budget. Potential position losses in the technical services dept. are emanate. My acquisitions assistant is retiring next year and more than likely her position will not be filled. I wanted to find a way to efficiently handle her workload with the remaining staff and myself once she is gone.

Time for a Change! In an effort to both slow and reduce spending, as well as refreshing and streamlining our monographs selection workflow we decided to take another look at approval plans and selection tools offered by third party vendors. We specifically looked at Midwest Library Services InterACQ, and YBP’s Gobi3. In April 2013 I received access to Gobi and began setting up accounts and training myself on how to navigate the system so that I could instruct the rest of the staff. We looked at Midwest because we had set up an approval plan with them in 2007, however we never really utilized the plan to its full capacity. We only used the slips generated by our approval plan criteria to order titles from Amazon or other vendors. We looked at GOBI in a different way. Not really interested in using it as an approval plan, but just as a selection tool to help move the process along. We didn’t want books just coming in…with our financial situation we wanted to be able to control what we ordered and when we received it.

Why GOBI? We wanted a product that had a simple platform to interface with so that the selection librarians could jump right into using it before our new fiscal year began on June 1st. We also wanted a product that would help the acquisitions department streamline its Millennium workflow. YBP/ Gobi 3 was initially suggested by our Head of Reference who had also worked at the South Pasadena Public Library on the weekends, and while on the desk she used Gobi to select titles. We wanted the selection librarians to be able to go online and make selections for our library to purchase. The Midwest interface was not as dynamic or intuitive, so Gobi was a top contender with the selection librarians. We also wanted this to be a quick process, as we were preparing to roll into the new fiscal year we didn’t want something that would take 6 months to implement… little did I know that this implementation would take right at 6 months. And for me and my assistant to be able to control the actual ordering and invoicing process. We had been ordering tons of things from amazon and reconciling the purchase card at the end of the month was becoming a nightmare. At the same time I wanted this selection process to help me (the acquisitions librarian) streamline the ordering workflow and help reduce our spending… (ex. Order record creation in millennium at the time the order is made, streamlining invoicing as well as bringing in OCLC records into the system.) And looking down the road at our future workflows we wanted a vendor and product that we could grow with (potential for ebook purchasing as well as shelf ready materials) Innovative Interfaces was one of the first systems to take advantage of the kinds of efficiencies that can be achieved by loading batches of records from book vendors. Several years ago, they pioneered the concept of using MARC records with local data fields containing acquisitions and invoicing data as a way of moving information between the library and book vendor. III has partnered with GOBI and there is plenty of documentation from to show their ability to integrate with III products. She also did the bulk of the selection in our library so her suggestion was weighed the heaviest in our decision making plan.

GOBI Setup Demo account set up in April 2013 Setup librarian selector accounts and preferences Setup Gobi Notifications/Alerts Setup Gobi pricing structure with NELLCO Affiliate discount Selected Gobi advanced features GobiPlus: Advanced search, Folders, Library Notes and Save Search GoBeyond: Peer Comparison Reports, New Title Reports and Peer History Full Text Reviews: Booklist, Choice, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal Electronic Order Confirmation Records - Plus (EOCRs) service - Worldcat records with embedded order data additional cost for OCLC records Load Table Mapping – Tech Specs Vital to being able to export bib records and create new order records in Millennium from Gobi. Electronic Invoicing – Not chosen due to cost from III - Extended Approval Plan Interface (a nearly 5 figure cost)

Load table mapping Data Description Format Default For III III Loads As ISBN 10 or 13 characters 020 $a 100 $a 245 $a 250 $a 260 $a 260 $b 260 $c 490 $a Author up to 50 characters Title up to 100 characters Edition up to 20 characters Place of Publication Publisher Year of Publication yyyy Series Title Date Ordered yyyymmdd 984 $a – Time Ordered hhmmss 984 $b YBP order key for III applications for Voyager applications 11 characters 982 $a 024 $a 961 $i VEN ID # YBP UID up to 9 digits 987 $a Vendor Code YBP or YBP UK 984 $c Subaccount Number 6 or 7 digits 982 $b 961$m VEN ACCT # Item PO Number up to 16 characters 982 $c Binding paper or cloth 982 $d Initials up to 10 characters 982 $e 961 $f SELECTOR Quantity up to 3 digits 980 $g 960 $o COPIES/QTY Fund Code 981 $b 960 $u FUND Volume Number up to 3 characters 993 $a 961 $a IDENTITY List Price qty 1 price at time of export up to 8 characters nnnnn.nn 980 $b 960 $s E PRICE Order Note 1 up to 99 characters 982 $f 961 $h VEN NOTE Group PO/”Sep By” ** 981 $a Location Code 981 $c 960 $t LOCATION Other Local ID 981 $d Local Data 1 up to 80 characters 985 $a 960 $v* VENDOR Local Data 2 985 $b 961 $c NOTE Local Data 3 985 $c 961 $d INT NOTE Local Data 4 985 $d Currency of Price ISO code 980 $z 960 $z CURR CODE * for III applications libraries require the output of the vendor code the local system uses for YBP (if that differs from the YBP/YBP UK code automatically output as the ‘vendor code’ in EOCRs). A library- supplied vendor code can be output in any GOBI local data field and mapped to 960 $v for output. Many III libraries choose to record the code in Local Data 1 on the GOBI screen ** Used to assign items to invoices. Requires special account set-up. For authorized accounts, this data element appears on GOBI as “invoice sort”. Load table mapping

Millennium Setup Load profiling service Additional cost Handled completely behind the scenes by III Instructions on how to use Data Exchange in the Cataloging module so that I could bring in the records from Gobi. Instructions were provided after the load table profiling was completed.

Data exchange ftp to get orders from GOBI

Records available for download

View of one record before as it appears from GOBI

I use a create list to gather all the orders I have downloaded to do a rapid update to correct the order date. Something weird has happened with the load table and the order dates are incorrect.

Rapid Update to correct Order date

View of a created order record

Support No Support from LLS Campus IT Department was needed. GOBI Support - Three levels Sales Representative: Facilitated conversations within the organization. Provided basic instruction on how to use the GOBI interface. Provided Pricing and discount information on additional features. Technical Services Representative: Provided different options available to integrate GOBI with Millennium. Created Tech-Specs and facilitated load table mapping Bibliographer Dedicated customer service representative covers all bases. Sales Representative: My initial contact (April of 2013) is also our Baker & Taylor rep. and she facilitated conversations with other people in the organization (how to add librarians/selectors, and how to order titles using the system). Technical Services Rep. Drama with Load Tables due to my ignorance about load tables in general and insufficient information from III.

Support - continued III Support Load Table – Since we did not have a Systems Librarian or any staff member with III Load Table training at the time of implementation we had to pay for load profiling service to have III create a Load Profile to suit the  Gobi  requirements. Profiling Service - This was an unanticipated cost that ended up adding a sizable sum to our total Gobi implementation cost. Load Tables: If you are not a systems librarian or have not had load table training from III this entire process will be foreign to you and apparently to everyone at III as well. This one issue added about 3 additional months of back and forth between myself and III trying to figure out if I already had a load table that could be used, and if so how to map the table to the specifications laid out between GOBI and III. It turns out that I did not have a usable Load Table, and we were given 2 options… 1) pay for the profiling service where III will do the mapping for you…however there is a proprietary cost to this that I can’t share…however once you let III make this LT for you if you do go get LT training you will not be able to edit the table…you will only be able to copy it and make a new table. Get load table training…This is a 3 day onsite workshop that is only offered a few times a year. There is a cost to this training as well…obviously in the time and money spent on travel and hotel accommodations…however there is also a cost for the training itself for which you must obtain one of those infamous III quotes. The load profile function is only turned on for libraries who have sent staff to a workshop.

Lessons Learned Communication Response Time: The most difficult part of this implementation was getting a timely response back from a III representative. Implement an actual Implementation plan Consult the IUG community. Trying to recreate the wheel is extremely time consuming. I let them know I was trying to work on a tight timeline, but that seemed to be of little importance, and I only managed to get what I did by hounding different people. Trying to wing any project that combines resources with two different vendors is a bad idea. Instead of just basing the value of the product off of one persons opinion of the product we should have done a through evaluation of the product prior to getting involved…We would not have wasted so much time and money had I actually had a plan. Also a better use of my time and a valuable lesson I learned would have been for me to consult the IUG list-serve community to get answers regarding this implementation. I know we aren't the first ones to use GOBI in this fashion so going forward I will turn to the vast community and its resources before running into the III brick wall repeatedly.

Questions? Contact Information: Dawn Smith Dawn.Smith@lls.edu 213.736.1174