What’s the Form and What Does This Mean? Approaching a Large Primo/Alma Consortial Implementation

Abstract

The State University of New York (SUNY) is comprised of 60 institutions going live in July 2019, with diverse campus types and levels of complexity for library technology. One of SUNY’s main implementation goals was for campus staff to focus less on learning the implementation structure and process used by Ex Libris and instead make as much of the campus experience about learning Alma and transitioning from current to new practices in a contemporary system in a shared environment. A secondary goal of the implementation was to provide as much contextualized training that would help our libraries not only learn workflows in Alma, but to learn why workflows had changed or were configured this way in Alma. These goals led the SUNY Project Managers to approach the myriad of forms Ex Libris uses for migration as an effort we needed to approach as a larger project problem, not a campus problem, which led to the project managers creating and submitting migration forms for 52 of our 60 campuses on their behalf. This approach certainly led to efficiencies, but also led to issues we needed to address via training. As we’ve developed understanding of how our campuses are engaging with learning Alma and Primo, we identified a need to go from webinars to short courses so that training is always contextualized, and packaged in a way that the learning is scaffolded, enabling campuses to engage with Alma in a way that is unified, but is also appropriately chunked into meaningful learning modules.