Kangaroo Island goes live

Kangaroo Island has joined the consortium today - a day early.  We're delighted to have them on board.  And for those of you who are unaware, the library has their main branch at Kingscote, with an annexe at the village of Penneshaw.

Customer Service & Library Officer Tanya Tweden told the local newspaper, "We are excited to be part of the One Card network as it will be of great benefit to our Kangaroo Island community. This project would not have been possible without the support of our dedicated Library and Customer Service team.” And I am sure that this is correct.  My desk is near where PLS project officers Jo Rivers and Sue Isted sit & I have heard the regular project implementation calls between PLS and the KI team.

The Kangaroo Island Enterprise site can be found here.

The library will do their community launch next Tuesday, with a morning tea. 

Update: The library tells us that they had a great morning tea with customers and council staff on Tuesday 13th.  They also delivered catalogue demonstrations to the public.   Below are a couple of pictures below - of staff demonstrating the system to customers & celebrating with their banner & balloons.

Library staff Tanya Tweden, Danielle Fleet & Jan Sundberg

Victor Harbor goes live

May has started with a bang - with Victor Harbor going live as the library opened to the public at 9:30 on 1 May. Victor is the first of four additions to the consortium in May, with Kangaroo Island, Renmark and Mannum scheduled to also join up this month.

The launch event included the council's Mayor & CEO along with volunteers, Friends, library staff and various council staff who had been part of or provided support for the project. Lyal, Sue and I - all from PLS were very happy to be part of the launch. 

It was a very BLUE event, with a gourmet spread of all things blue, from jelly cakes to lollies, and soft drinks, as you can see from the photos below.

The Victor Harbor Enterprise site is here.

The library's preparation of their public for the changes has been ongoing for months, using a countdown TV screen as well as a static display of what would happen in March, April and May and what impact this would have on library users. And staff's hard work has paid off with an incredibly smooth transition.

Ben Footner (library manager - seen at the front of the team below) noted that the team will be looking forward to future school holidays now that they're on the system.  Apparently over the last year or so very eager customers from One Card libraries who were holidaying in Victor appeared at the desk with a pile of books, expecting to be able to check them out on their "home" library card.  The library then joined up these visitors, but they'll really be looking forward to having a seamless procedure from now on.

The very happy Victor Harbor library staff team with a few PLS ring-ins

The countdown screen which customers see as they exit the library. 
It has been running the small One Card videos and other information

The very blue & very enjoyable spread!! 

...and more!

The "countdown" information display

Making eResources discoverable in Enterprise

You may be aware that SirsiDynix has released a product called eResource Central, which enables e-resources (e-books & digital audio books) to be discoverable in each library's Enterprise site.

When it was 1st released eRC didn't have the connectors for our e-content provider Overdrive fully established.  However over the last 12 months they have progressed their connections with a variety of content providers including Overdrive.  Given this progress PLS has agreed to purchase and install eRC so that the Overdrive content that the consortium currently subscribes to will be made available directly in Enterprise.  This fulfils one of the original intentions of the One Card project - that the discovery layer (Enterprise) would be the single point of access for all library content.

The timing of the deployment of eRC is constrained by the rollout timetable (17 libraries in 5 months).  Therefore we are planning to get eRC up & running soon after our last library joins the consortium in late September.  At this stage we have not done a full project plan to identify all that we need to do & what a realistic deployment date may be. However we are about to get eRC installed on our "test" system, so that we can become familiar with it, and be well placed to install it as soon as we get an opportunity to do so.

At this stage SirsiDynix is working with further expand the range of e-content vendors which are eRC compliant.  Once this happens we will have the opportunity to consider other e-content providers, as we could then integrate all providers' content directly into Enterprise. (Of course there will be the usual procurement processes to go through to get content from others.  I will have more to say about this in a later post.)  However, even before we add additional paid content to the consortium we do have the option of adding free content from places like the Project Gutenberg and the Open Library. 

So - how does eRC work?  You can watch the great simple video on eRC below or find it on the Web here.

And there is a longer conversation with the product manager from SirsiDynix in the video below.

There is also some brief information on the vendor website.  The Swift consortium in Victoria has already implemented and blogged about how eRC works for them.

As we get closer to implementing eRC, and once we've learned more about how it works through working with it in our Test system we will provide more information.  Should there be a need for any training or handouts for the public we will deal with this closer to the event.

Inter-Library Loan / transit rate fulfilment

As you're aware, part of the PLS team is still in "implementation mode" for the One Card project, however we're also interested in doing some data analysis of how the consortium is performing.  While we haven't had a great amount of time and resources to do this work, some recent analysis of the rate of "hold fulfilment" has been undertaken.  The work was initiated as part of the project which is evaluating how well the project is fulfilling the original business case for the project.  However given the various anecdotes and perceptions around this topic I thought it was useful data to share.  We're still learning how to both gather and then interpret the data that we are getting out of Director's Station, but believe that the information below is accurate.

PLS staff looked at the holds filled and not filled over a 6 month period from October 2013 to March 2014 inclusive.  During this period over 390,000 holds were fulfilled or remained unfilled. 

The graph below shows the "fill rate" for these requests.  It shows us that while only 17% of requests were filled in the 1st month,  44% of requests were filled within 2 months, 67% were filled within 3 months & 85% were filled within 4 months.  These figures will change from time to time, but this 1st set of measures gives us a starting point from which to measure our performance.

 

From my experience in libraries, being able to fill 67% of all requests within 3 months is a very high success rate. It also gives us some preliminary information when talking to customers about the sorts of waiting times that they can expect - on average at least.  

 

 

 We will continue to run these reports from time to time & provide updates on this and other areas of the consortium's performance as we have such information to report.

 

De-duplication continues to deliver benefits

As anyone using the system will know, the issue of duplicate bibliographic records continues to be one of our biggest hurdles to efficiency, in terms of searching for items in specific libraries, managing "holds," the number of items in transit, cataloguing to the correct bib records and other areas.  Some libraries are performing manual "transferring" - i.e. resolving these duplicate records, which is to the benefit of all who use the system.

To attempt to speed up this process we engaged SirsiDynix to run a de-duplication script across the database over Easter, with the intent to merge as many bibliographic records as we could find exact match points for. The script has managed to merge over 20,000 records, which is a great outcome.  

The process also identified a further 1,300 records which could be merged, however they have items with the status of "in transit" which stops the merge happening.  Therefore the script will continue to be run a number of times over the next week or so with the intent of resolving these items as their status changes from "in transit".

We will continue to run de-duplication scripts from time to time, however there are a significant number of records on the system which cannot be resolved using automated scripting.  Therefore we will need to use a concerted approach of staff fixing these intractable records.

PLS will be working with the LMS User Group to identify an equitable way of assigning this transferring work, with the aim of having a much cleaner database in the coming months.  We will keep you posted as to how this progresses.

Tumby Bay goes live

The Tumby Bay School Community Library went live On Thursday last week (10 April), just in time for the School Holidays.  I have held off posting about the library until some photos of the day came through.

The Library's Enterprise site is here.  

The LMS project office is marking this addition to the consortium as it completes the rollout of the network to all libraries on the Eyre Peninsula.

Fran Oswald, the library's teacher librarian sent me the following message about the project: 

Here at Tumby Bay we are all extremely excited to finally go live and join the consortium.

I would like to thank my two staff members Kerrie and Jane for their hard work (especially while I was holidaying for three weeks in South Africa prior to our go live date.) A HUGE thankyou must go to Sue and the team at PLS for all their help and guidance during this busy time.

 

Fran has also provided us with a few photos of the day - with a combination of eager public and school customers happy to test the system and enjoy the library's hospitality. 



Local public customers - the 1st to use the system,
with library staff Kerry and Jane in the background

School students learning about the new system before joining the festivities

They tell us that the principal was blown away by the system

Students enjoying the cupcakes galore as part of the celebration

 

Franklin Harbour goes live

Where is Franklin Harbour I hear you ask.  It is the name of the council which includes the town of Cowell on the Eyre Peninsula where there is a School Community Library. The library joined the consortium on Thursday last week (3 April) but we've held off publicising it as I've waited to get some photos of both Thursday and Friday at the library. 

The "go live" on Thursday was followed by a "twilight day" at the school on Friday.  The school opened at noon and stayed open into the evening to provide parents & the wider community an opportunity to attend and view all of the school's activities.  This provided a perfect opportunity for the Mayor to do an official launch of Cowell joining the rapidly expanding consortium.

Library staff tell me that they slept well on the weekend after the huge amount of work it took their small team to get their library onto the consortium.

The Enterprise site for the library can be found here.

We are now just waiting for Tumby Bay to join & that will mean that all of the Eyre Peninsula will be consortium participants.

Below are a few photos of Thursday & Friday at Cowell.

Staff at Cowell checking out items on the new system

 

Students using Enterprise for the 1st time



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