[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] ***SPAM*** RE: acquisitions redux

[Mary Llewellyn]

Hi all,

 

We are a consortium with some libraries that used Acquisitions in our old
system. (They are all public libraries, not academic.)  When we migrated to
Evergreen, Acquisitions had moved from being a preview to being a flawed,
though functional part of the system. However, some of our acq libraries
dropped using it because it was slow and clunky workflow. 

 

However, since we've upgraded to Evergreen 2.2, we've seen a lot of
improvements in Acquisitions. Most of our libraries use Title Source and
upload their orders to Evergreen in a MARC file. In the past, our
aggravation was that staff had to manually link each lineitem to the
catalog, or risk creating duplicate records in the catalog. Since the
upgrade, the uploading process works with the Vandelay loader to
automatically match existing bib records and associate the lineitems with
those bibs. 

 

Since this improvement, a couple of member libraries have contacted me to
get them started in using Acquisitions. 

 

We are looking forward to further improvements, especially in the area of
invoicing. 

 

For more detail about how we use Acquisitions, I'm happy to share the
documentation that I wrote for our libraries.
http://biblio.org/dbs/Acq%20Table%20of%20Contents.htm

 

Mary

 

Mary Llewellyn

Database Manager

Bibliomation, Inc.

Middlebury, CT

mllewell at biblio.org

 

 

 

From: open-ils-general-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org
[mailto:open-ils-general-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org] On Behalf Of
Tara Robertson
Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2012 12:42 PM
To: Evergreen Discussion Group
Subject: Re: [OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] acquisitions redux

 

Hi,

 

This is my perspective in using ACQ since January, mainly through managing
tech services in small academic library. I would not recommend using ACQ at
this point. 

 

For me performance is the main issue. ACQ is dreadfully slow. We are in a
urban centre, with a good ISP, nearby the data centre for our consortium and
things were still brutally slow. The Sitka support folks have a workaround
accessing some of ACQ through a web browser, which improves things quite a
bit. Instead of being very, very, very slow, they are just slow. This was
not a deal breaker for us, as we have a very small acquisitions budget
(~$40k/year). However most of my staff using ACQ were quite frustrated and
cranky. If I had known how poor the performance was I would've waited until
the next fiscal year to use start acquisitions. I wouldn't recommend using
ACQ at this point. I see the potential for ACQ to be awesome in the future
(it's very flexible and will support so many types of workflows), but right
now it isn't. 

 

I've been wary to share my frustrations with ACQ on this list because I know
that there are people who are considering migrating to Evergreen and that
there are likely proprietary ILS vendor reps on this list who are looking
for more fodder to scare their customers away from using Evergreen. As the
software and our community mature we need to foster a culture where we can
communicate frankly and help build the software and community that we want.
In that vein, I'm extremely grateful to the folks who've been working behind
the scenes to flesh out development priorities, functional requirements, get
some cash together to pay for development and to the developers who seem to
be listening:
http://blog.esilibrary.com/2012/07/11/high-speed-2-3-acq-development/

 

Sitka has excellent documentation for ACQ, but I'm not sure if they are
sharing it beyond their consortium. Perhaps someone from Sitka could share
the link? 

 

Hope this is useful,

Tara

 

On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 7:23 AM, J. Sara Paulk <jsarapaulk-wgrl at gmx.com>
wrote:

Appreciate responses and realize that there is some basic documentation out
there.  Let me take a different approach.  Those of you who are using
Acquisitions.  

 

What decisions did you make when you started that you totally regret  or
conversely are thrilled with? 

 

What do you wish with all your heart that you had done prior to start using
the module?

 

What do you wish you had known that you know now?

 

Who do you wish you had involved that you didn't?

 

What steps is the Evergreen documentation missing or what assumptions does
it make that it shouldn't?

 

Any other general words of wisdom for one who may be going into the fray are
and will be greatly appreciated.  Thanks in advance.

 

 

Respectfully,

 

J. Sara Paulk                      Regional Director   Wythe-Grayson
Regional Library

P.O. Box 159, Independence, VA  24348     Phone-276-773-3018 / FAX
276-773-3289

http://wythegrayson.lib.va.us                        Email
jsarapaulk-wgrl at gmx.com 

 

 

 

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