We now have a consortium

Onkaparinga "went live" this morning. We therefore have the start of a consortium with 2 libraries (8 branches & a mobile) sharing a common database of customers and items. And this allows customers from each library to directly access each others resources. Small steps - but bigger things to come!!

Progress to this point has not been without its minor glitches and issues that have had us perplexed and acting quickly to overcome these challenges. And we know that there will be minor wrinkles going forward.

We've learnt a bit about data merging, and the need to ensure that necessary (but not obvious) changes are made to local catalogue records prior to loading and merging. These learnings will assist us in ensuring that as we add each new library we will minimise data issues.

I'd like to pay tribute to the good humour and dedication of staff in both libraries who have had to deal with a few unintended consequences as we've all learnt together about some of the intricacies of building this shared system.  While there may be a certain prestige in joining early, there has been quite a bit of experimentation and extra work done by our 1st 2 library services.  Future additions to the consortium will benefit from the work done and lessons learned over the last few weeks!

Onkaparinga has its Enterprise site up and running.  It is here.

I'm not sure if you've seen the banners that we have developed for each library.  To keep a consistent message and look we have re-used the artwork that has been used in the videos etc. 

We will provide every library branch with 2 banners per branch for a few weeks prior to and after "go live" day. These will be shipped to libraries as they approach their go live date.

We also have bookmarks which will be shipped to all libraries close to their go live. The artwork on the bookmarks is the same as the banners.

Alexandrina will go "off line" early next week so that they can go live on Thursday next week, with Marion going live on the 24th.