[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] migration plan

[Tara Robertson]

Hi Deena,

We migrated to evergreen last May. The Sitka (BC, Canada consortium who is
hosting Evergreen for us and about 50 other libraries) provided the
training, data migration services and support on the go-live day and also
ongoing support. They were/are awesome.

It sounds like you'll have additional things to think about if you're
hosting Evergreen yourself. I hope your county IT person is familiar with
library systems, but I know in libraries we have to make it work with what
we've got.

I'm presenting at the Evergreen conference with James Fournie from the
Sitka team. I used to work with the Sitka folks and had been involved in a
bunch of migrations from the migration team side of things. I was also very
familiar with the Evergreen software, so I knew how I wanted some things to
work in my library. I'm not finished writing my presentation yet, but
here's some of my thoughts from the library-that-is-migrating side of
things.


   1. clean up your data - this can be done before you select the library
   system you are going to migrate to, or even before you have a migration
   plan in place. if you're on an older system you're going to need to migrate
   to something, sometime. Pick through your patron and item categories and
   figure out what you don't need anymore (we had a Horizon itype of "items
   over $100" that had only 8 items in it--we regularly circulate DVDs that
   are worth more than $500, so I knew this was a category from a long time
   ago that we no longer needed. If it's possible simplify your circ policies
   as it'll make testing your data later easier. this was a really useful
   process for me as i got to know our data well and i was able to help other
   staff better understand ILSes, our legacy system and what could be
   possible--namely by understanding what things affected circulation and what
   did not (for example, in Horizon collection code does not affect circ, but
   in Evergreen a shelving location has a circulate yes/no flag).
   2. put together a project plan - map out go-live date (might be a good
   plan to target having circ working on the go-live date, and put your
   cataloging, acquisitions, etc on hold for a bit), final data snapshot,
   other data snapshots, staff training days, and the deadline for notifying
   your previous ILS vendor that you're leaving. know what dates are
   completely fixed and know that you may need to work some long hours.
   3. find, read and understand the exit clauses in your current ILS
   contract - if you are currently paying maintenance to another company for
   your ILS, figure out how much notice you will need to give them so you
   aren't charged for another year of maintenance. make sure you have good
   data snapshots/exports from your old system before you contact the vendor
   to say you're leaving. i was really excited about dreaming about a go-live
   date and almost overlooked this--i had an unnecessarily stressful week
   while we scraped in under the deadline.
   1. optional: thank the support people who you've worked with. i wasn't a
      fan of the previous company we got support from, but the people
who worked
      there were excellent. after wrapping up the contact stuff with the right
      person i wrote the support folks who had helped me to thank
them. they are
      nice smart, hardworking people who helped me better understand the system
      and helped me do some technical things that didn't know how to do.
      4. ensure you have support from your managers/directors - this is a
   big job and you need to make sure you have the money, moral support and buy
   in from the top.
   5. manage staff expectations - an ILS migration is the biggest change a
   library will go through. many libraries have never been through a
   migration, they might have automated 10 years ago. no one knows what to
   expect. our migration went very smoothly but some staff were cranky as
   every bell and whistle wasn't working on the go-live day.
   6. communicate lots with staff - i gave a migration update at every
   staff meeting and sent out the occasional email update and posted updates
   on our wiki/intranet. if i were to do this again, i would've posted a big
   timeline in the workroom and crossed stuff off so everyone could see the
   progress (even if it didn't directly affect them) and emailed regular
   updates. our staff are flexible, keen to learn new things and
   technologically savvy--still this was stressful for people and i could've
   done a better job at communicating clearly what was going to happen and
   where we were in that process.
   7. figure out what other changes you want to make - we rejigged our
   student information export so circ staff wouldn't be manually entering new
   staff and faculty into the ILS, got receipt printers, and made a bunch of
   small procedural changes. library workflows are often dependent on the ILS,
   so it's a chance to think of ways to make your library (especially circ and
   tech services) work differently/better

So...make a plan, plan to communicate and keep communicating.

Hope that helps. We can email you our slides when we're done.

Good luck!
Tara


On Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 1:41 PM, Deana Cunningham <
deana.cunningham at granvillecounty.org> wrote:

> **
>
> Hello,
>
> I joined this mailing list to help our library system plan a migration to
> Evergreen. I have no experience with migration, and my director has
> peripheral experience from quite awhile ago, so we are looking for any
> information possible (i.e. timeline, first steps, staff requirements etc.).
> We have one county IT person who has been assigned to this project and he
> is in the process of reading the manual, and I am not sure that we will be
> allowed to contract with an outside company to do the migration (my first
> choice).
>
> So anything you can tell me about the process or your experiences would be
> welcome!
>
> Thanks,
>
> Deana L. Cunningham
> Branch Manager, South Branch Library
> Granville County Library System
> 1550 S. Campus Dr.
> Creedmoor, NC 27565
> (919) 528-1752
> deana.cunningham at granvillecounty.org
>
>
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