So what's next?

I mentioned yesterday that Port Adelaide Enfield was the last of our pilot sites.  We set ourselves a task to get the first 8 libraries live by 30 June & almost made that date. So congratulations to all staff in the participating libraries & a huge shout out to the PLS project team who have worked really hard to get to this point!!

We built a bit of time into the project plan to allow us to review what we've done, do any tweaking that is required and then move forward with confidence.  So while there are no plans for any more libraries to join the consortium this month there are all sorts of activities still going on.  I thought I'd give you a brief run down of these.

In terms of getting ready for more libraries to join the consortium project managers and the PLS team are currently working with the following libraries to go live during August to October:

• August:  Karoonda, East Murray, Lameroo & Pinnaroo
• September: Prospect, Walkerville, Campbelltown and Norwood Payneham & St Peters
• October: Wattle Range (Millicent & Penola) Robe, Kingston, Naracoorte and Tatiara (Keith  & Bordertown)

So that's another 15 library services to do in that 3 month window!

We also have Adelaide and the Flinders Mobile on our books for November and December, but we haven't formally started working with them yet.  And following the decision by Roxby Downs to dissolve their joint use library partnership and start a stand alone public library we're now working with them to support this change, and get them started on Symphony - albeit in a slightly different manner than libraries who are converting existing data.  I'll say more about this once we know a bit more about the process.

I also know that there are many staff in a range of libraries currently weeding their collections, adding C0 barcodes as required and adding ISBNs to their records.  So there is all sorts of work happening across almost all libraries!

As well as working with the 18 libraries we're busy working on the de-duplication process as mentioned here. And an update on this - it looks like we will be able to merge over 80,000 records, and there is some hope that we will be able to do some merging on DVDs - which is contrary to our earlier advice. This is all very good news! We're very keen to see how much of this can be done automatically, but we will proceed with caution.  I'll provide an update when we know more.

And the really exciting news is that we have just signed off on our enhancement request to get the transit slip routing process working correctly.  Why is this so exciting?  For 2 reasons:

1. At present the 8 participating libraries are having to manually produce routing slips - which is unsustainable.  So to get them being produced correctly and by the system will be fantastic for the currently participating libraries.
2. Also - this change is the enabler which will allow us to add all libraries in the State, and provide ILL access for all libraries to the holdings of the consortium libraries.  I am sure that this news will be greeted with considerable joy by all who are struggling with ILL requests at present.

It took us a while to get SirsiDynx to understand our needs, but once they "got it" the process has been quite quick.  SirisDynix aim to have this fix included in their "Service Pack" of changes to the standard way the software operates. This is great as it means that as the system keeps changing our needs will be met by the normal functionality, rather than us having some special customisation on our system.  The service pack is due for release in late July.  We will need to test its functionality to ensure it has no bugs, and then we will install it in our production version of Symphony - hopefully by early August.

We will then need to add all the libraries to Symphony, and this will enable the ILL process for all libraries to commence.  While this is a little later than I had hoped, I can accept that this is as quickly as large complex systems can be changed.

So - the team at PLS will be really busy & people in at least 20 libraries will also be working hard, getting ready for the next major group of additions starting in coming months.  We'll keep you informed of progress on all of these issues in coming weeks.