[Evergreen-acq] Changing ILS - Acquisitions

Fri Aug 4 12:32:43 EDT 2017

We migrated to Evergreen within the past year, and our acquisitions records were brought over from our previous system.  Our former system did not have the equivalent of Funding Sources, so we had to set those up as part of the migration.  Setting up our funds as part of the migration was pretty simple, but we don't have a complex funding structure.  We also had to work pretty closely with Equinox to help them understand our previous system so that they could map our data appropriately.  The two systems were quite different.

We did not have many orders in the old system because we had decided to wait to place orders until after the migration as far as possible, so we didn't have many to migrate.  We did NOT migrate order records from previous fiscal years.  However, our acquisitions assistant was not very happy with how the allocated/spent monies were being handled in the Funds in Evergreen after the migration.  I don't know if this was a result of the migration itself, or just that Evergreen is so different from our former system that she was having trouble adjusting to what it looked like.  If you need to migrate acquisitions data, it's definitely best to do it at the beginning of your FY if at all possible.

I'm rather surprised that Galen said provider records were straightforward to deal with, because this has been by far our biggest bugaboo.  We wanted to migrate our vendor records from our former system because we had close to 600 in the old system and didn't want to manually enter them all into Evergreen.  We also had a lot of information recorded about the vendors in the old system that we didn't want to lose.  Unfortunately, it turned out that the vendor notes from our old system are not usable in Evergreen.  While there is apparently a note field available in the Evergreen Provider record, it's not visible in the client, which makes it useless to us.  More than that, it makes it impossible for us to delete some vendor records we no longer want to keep.  If there's a note in the record, we can't see it or delete it from the provider record, which means we can't delete the provider out of Evergreen.  We've already submitted one list of providers that needed to be deleted to our consortium for Equinox to delete for us; we'll have another list for them at some point.

Additionally, searching for providers in Evergreen is really poor, and we had multiple display issues after our migration.  We tried to get some of that corrected, but I don't think we were ever able to get support to understand exactly what our problem was.  That issue was overwhelmed by other more urgent problems that had to be taken care of by our acceptance date.

As a side bar, this whole discussion brings up something that I would like to post to the new Evergreen-acq list if I ever get time to pursue it:  I really don't understand why Provider records are managed in the clunky Acquisitions Admin interface.  Why are they in Admin at all?  Ideally, I would like the Provider records to work like patron records in circulation, where they are in the main acquisitions interface, with full-fledged searching and editing capabilities that work and act like the search/editing capabilities for patron records.  I've never seen a system that treats vendor records the way Evergreen does.  <end of rant>

So, to sum up, it is possible to migrate Acquisitions data from your former system.  You might have better success and/or happier staff if you don't migrate data and start clean in the new system.  This probably depends on how complex your data is and how much you need to migrate.  If you have only a few provider records, you certainly won't have the same problems we did.  We did not have any problems setting up our fund structure and the orders we migrated came over successfully, though we did need a few post-migration tweaks.

Irene Patrick
Library & Information Management Systems Librarian
N.C. Government & Heritage Library
State Library of North Carolina
N.C. Dept. of Natural and Cultural Resources
(919) 807-7413   
irene dot patrick at ncdcr dot gov

109 E. Jones Street  |  4640 Mail Service Center  |  Raleigh, North Carolina 27699-4600

Email correspondence to and from this address is subject to the
North Carolina Public Records Law and may be disclosed to third parties.
_____________________________________________________________

-----Original Message-----
From: Evergreen-acq [mailto:evergreen-acq-bounces at list.evergreen-ils.org] On Behalf Of Martha Crawley
Sent: Friday, August 04, 2017 11:29 AM
To: evergreen-acq at list.evergreen-ils.org
Subject: Re: [Evergreen-acq] Changing ILS - Acquisitions

Yes, we were using acquisitions in our previous ILS when we changed to Evergreen. At the time, I couldn't imagine how it could possibly work either.  I decided to just start fresh with Evergreen but our collection manager wanted to be able to see the history of what had been ordered previously. So the existing orders were loaded into Evergreen in such a way that I could see the information but I couldn't do anything with it; it was just there for information purposes only. We kept running our old ILS (it was housed on our own server & only tech services had access to it) until all existing orders were completed. Any new orders were created in Evergreen. Luckily we migrated near the end of a fiscal year so we didn't have that much that was still outstanding.  Once everything was received and invoiced in our old system we shut it down. 

In hindsight, I think migrating the whole thing would probably have worked OK.

Martha Crawley, Tech Services Mgr.
Cumberland Co. Public Library
300 Maiden Lane
Fayetteville, NC 28301
910 483-1580 x1308

-----Original Message-----
From: Evergreen-acq [mailto:evergreen-acq-bounces at list.evergreen-ils.org] On Behalf Of evergreen-acq-request at list.evergreen-ils.org
Sent: Friday, August 04, 2017 9:57 AM
To: evergreen-acq at list.evergreen-ils.org
Subject: Evergreen-acq Digest, Vol 3, Issue 1

Send Evergreen-acq mailing list submissions to
	evergreen-acq at list.evergreen-ils.org

To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
	http://list.evergreen-ils.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/evergreen-acq
or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
	evergreen-acq-request at list.evergreen-ils.org

You can reach the person managing the list at
	evergreen-acq-owner at list.evergreen-ils.org

When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of Evergreen-acq digest..."

Today's Topics:

   1. Changing ILS - Acquisitions (Leslie St. John)
   2. Re: Changing ILS - Acquisitions (Deborah Luchenbill)
   3. Re: Changing ILS - Acquisitions (Galen Charlton)
   4. Re: Changing ILS - Acquisitions (Leslie St. John)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2017 14:46:43 -0400
From: "Leslie St. John" <lstjohn at georgialibraries.org>
To: evergreen-acq at list.evergreen-ils.org
Subject: [Evergreen-acq] Changing ILS - Acquisitions
Message-ID:
	<CAOTsCnn=CV3BHFg+jVQP=j_rcroq5wba5AvB=JpNOxGHtDvhDQ at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

We will be bringing in to our consortium a new library system that is already using Acquisitions from another ILS. I wonder, has anyone every migrated Acqusitions data from one ILS to another?  I can't imagine it, but there's at least one vendor out there who thinks this can be done.
If yes, please reply ON the list.

Thanks,
Leslie

Leslie St. John
*PINES Services Specialist*
Georgia Public Library Service
1800 Century Place, Suite 150
Atlanta, GA 30345-4304
404-235-7129 tel
404.235.7201 fax
www.georgialibraries.org
www.gapines.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://list.evergreen-ils.org/pipermail/evergreen-acq/attachments/20170803/90ee3737/attachment-0001.html>

------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2017 15:10:42 -0500
From: Deborah Luchenbill <deborah at mobiusconsortium.org>
To: Discussion of acquisitions in Evergreen
	<evergreen-acq at list.evergreen-ils.org>
Subject: Re: [Evergreen-acq] Changing ILS - Acquisitions
Message-ID:
	<CAGv20nNqvx+rPCMaATQFqZDiBi19eSPaA060huXcivX4nDBotw at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

Leslie, I asked Blake about your question (he's not subscribed to this
list) because he just did this.  His response is below (I will make a caveat--the data being migrated is from a home-grown ILS of another library system in Missouri, so it's not from a commercial vendor).

----
Leslie,

This is good timing. I just migrated acquisitions data for a soon-to-join library. We generally discourage migration of acquisitions data because of fiscal years and reporting. Or, if we can, we time the migration between fiscal years, so that the library can start fresh acquisitions in Evergreen and leave their old ILS data intact on the old system.

In this case, we went ahead and migrated the data because they strictly used it with a single vendor. They also do not use Fund sources. The data was purely for copy creation. It turned out that we were able to create the purchase orders, lineitems, lineitem_details, and invoices from the data.
Skipping the funding sources all together. This enabled us to populate the catalog with the copies created from the migrated purchase orders.

-Blake-
Conducting Magic
MOBIUS573-234-4513 <(573)%20234-4513>877-312-3517 <(877)%20312-3517>

----------------------------------------------
Debbie Luchenbill
Evergreen Coordinator
MOBIUS
111 E. Broadway, Ste. 220
Columbia, MO  65203
debbie at mobiusconsortium.org <deborah at mobiusconsortium.org>
573-234-4914
https://mobiusconsortium.org <http://mobiusconsortium.org> Missouri Evergreen Help Desk: help at mobiusconsortium.org / 877-312-3517 http://libraries.missourievergreen.org

On Thu, Aug 3, 2017 at 1:46 PM, Leslie St. John < lstjohn at georgialibraries.org> wrote:

> We will be bringing in to our consortium a new library system that is 
> already using Acquisitions from another ILS. I wonder, has anyone 
> every migrated Acqusitions data from one ILS to another?  I can't 
> imagine it, but there's at least one vendor out there who thinks this can be done.
> If yes, please reply ON the list.
>
> Thanks,
> Leslie
>
> Leslie St. John
> *PINES Services Specialist*
> Georgia Public Library Service
> 1800 Century Place, Suite 150
> Atlanta, GA 30345-4304
> 404-235-7129 <(404)%20235-7129> tel
> 404.235.7201 <(404)%20235-7201> fax
> www.georgialibraries.org
> www.gapines.org
>
> _______________________________________________
> Evergreen-acq mailing list
> Evergreen-acq at list.evergreen-ils.org
> http://list.evergreen-ils.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/evergreen-acq
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://list.evergreen-ils.org/pipermail/evergreen-acq/attachments/20170803/5e071f82/attachment-0001.html>

------------------------------

Message: 3
Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2017 17:23:51 -0400
From: Galen Charlton <gmc at equinoxinitiative.org>
To: Discussion of acquisitions in Evergreen
	<evergreen-acq at list.evergreen-ils.org>
Subject: Re: [Evergreen-acq] Changing ILS - Acquisitions
Message-ID:
	<CAPLnt66zx+2hfK-0_bmWXaunJrVnDBKFvo4e5aQgOxh7+tzsfg at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"

Hi,

On Thu, Aug 3, 2017 at 2:46 PM, Leslie St. John <lstjohn at georgialibraries.org> wrote:
> We will be bringing in to our consortium a new library system that is 
> already using Acquisitions from another ILS. I wonder, has anyone 
> every migrated Acqusitions data from one ILS to another?  I can't 
> imagine it, but there's at least one vendor out there who thinks this can be done.
> If yes, please reply ON the list.

We've migrated acquisitions data for several libraries. Provider records tend to be straightforward to deal with, although setting up EDI profiles tends to be done manually. We've also migrated funds, fund allocations, orders, line items, and invoices. We typically recommend that libraries just migrate data for the current fiscal year and compile whatever reports they need from past fiscal years to keep their auditors happy, but have migrated data for back fiscal years on one or two occasions.

Regards,

Galen
--
Galen Charlton
Infrastructure and Added Services Manager Equinox Open Library Initiative
phone:  1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457)
email:  gmc at equinoxInitiative.org
web:  https://equinoxInitiative.org
direct: +1 770-709-5581
cell:   +1 404-984-4366

------------------------------

Message: 4
Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2017 09:56:24 -0400
From: "Leslie St. John" <lstjohn at georgialibraries.org>
To: Discussion of acquisitions in Evergreen
	<evergreen-acq at list.evergreen-ils.org>
Subject: Re: [Evergreen-acq] Changing ILS - Acquisitions
Message-ID:
	<CAOTsCnnR=VQQ6o6xU+GBUDBBFSi37n1UOYnN5rznGZ_jUdNNSw at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

Thanks to both of you. As we move forward with this project we may be in
touch.
Leslie

Leslie St. John
*PINES Services Specialist*
Georgia Public Library Service
1800 Century Place, Suite 150
Atlanta, GA 30345-4304
404-235-7129 tel
404.235.7201 fax
www.georgialibraries.org
www.gapines.org

On Thu, Aug 3, 2017 at 5:23 PM, Galen Charlton <gmc at equinoxinitiative.org>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On Thu, Aug 3, 2017 at 2:46 PM, Leslie St. John
> <lstjohn at georgialibraries.org> wrote:
> > We will be bringing in to our consortium a new library system that is
> > already using Acquisitions from another ILS. I wonder, has anyone every
> > migrated Acqusitions data from one ILS to another?  I can't imagine it,
> but
> > there's at least one vendor out there who thinks this can be done.
> > If yes, please reply ON the list.
>
> We've migrated acquisitions data for several libraries. Provider
> records tend to be straightforward to deal with, although setting up
> EDI profiles tends to be done manually. We've also migrated funds,
> fund allocations, orders, line items, and invoices. We typically
> recommend that libraries just migrate data for the current fiscal year
> and compile whatever reports they need from past fiscal years to keep
> their auditors happy, but have migrated data for back fiscal years on
> one or two occasions.
>
> Regards,
>
> Galen
> --
> Galen Charlton
> Infrastructure and Added Services Manager
> Equinox Open Library Initiative
> phone:  1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457)
> email:  gmc at equinoxInitiative.org
> web:  https://equinoxInitiative.org
> direct: +1 770-709-5581
> cell:   +1 404-984-4366
> _______________________________________________
> Evergreen-acq mailing list
> Evergreen-acq at list.evergreen-ils.org
> http://list.evergreen-ils.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/evergreen-acq
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://list.evergreen-ils.org/pipermail/evergreen-acq/attachments/20170804/3712a1e4/attachment.html>

------------------------------

Subject: Digest Footer

_______________________________________________
Evergreen-acq mailing list
Evergreen-acq at list.evergreen-ils.org
http://list.evergreen-ils.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/evergreen-acq

------------------------------

End of Evergreen-acq Digest, Vol 3, Issue 1
*******************************************
_______________________________________________
Evergreen-acq mailing list
Evergreen-acq at list.evergreen-ils.org
http://list.evergreen-ils.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/evergreen-acq