2 The Boston campus stands on the site of the first World Series, held in Tickets were $.50 About Northeastern

Snell Library 3 Most of collection budget spent on electronic Distance education & satellite campuses growing Campus legal very risk-averse

Our Systems Before Alma 4 III Millennium ILS & ERM (Oracle) TDNet TOUResolver & KnowledgeBase EBSCO Discovery Service III Millennium Web OPAC

Why Alma? Our previous system was based on the management of print resources Library staff spend time doing more and more duplicate work Inability to easily extract critical management information and reports from the system Previous system was a closed system and the Library is severely hampered by not being able to access its own data and use it in new, innovative ways 5

Why Alma? Alma is a “web-scale” library management system that facilitates collaboration with other libraries We really like the idea of sharing community metadata Northeastern would not need to purchase or maintain local hardware and servers for the cloud-based system Interoperability with other Northeastern and vendor systems Alma is designed to support new models of acquisitions, including e-preferred, patron-driven, etc 6

Why Alma? Alma will offer significant management information and reporting as a standard module, including usage information, cost per use. We would like to be able to report statistical information to ACRL and others in a more efficient manner There was a strong financial incentive as early adopters as well as oppourtunity to shape the product development 7

Implementation Milestones Project start: October, 2012 First data extract: January, 2013 Functional workshop: February, 2013 Analytics training: March,

Implementation Milestones Revised acq data extract: April, 2013 Final data extract: June, 2013 Go-live: July, 2013 Certification training: July,

Challenging Implementation Missing context in WebEx training O Alma expertise, where art thou? More onsite visits please! Missing and developing data migration docs Project management plans 10

Challenging Implementation Please, please, please let me get what I want: access to configurations before go-live Tough migration process from non-EXL products 3 rd Party integrations a moving target Certifiably… certified? 11

Two months live… Optimistic about the future of Alma Still excited about URM model Happy to have hot fixes and monthly release cycle Forces us to look at workflows Already impressed with Analytics and see potential for it to be even more powerful 12

Two months live… Disappointed by the state of e-resource management – Uresolver: lots of customization needed – Knowledge Base: not the same as SFX? – Portfolio management: difficult and time consuming – Licensing: missing stability and flexibility 13

Two months live… Resource Management challenges – Metadata editor is still slow and awkward – Big sets & global updates are still difficult for us – No workflows have been improved…yet 14

Two months live… Missing flexibility & customization options – User roles and permissions – Order records – Licensing – Notices 15

Two months live… UI & UX needs improvement – Not intuitive – Course reserves & other core workflows clunky – Portfolio editor awkward – Metadata editor 16

Two months live… But we are still VERY optimistic! Convinced that Alma is the future Excited about partnering with ExL to improve it Eager to see more sites go live and build a strong community 17