Climbing up the unfathomable mountain of shared ILS: experience sharing from JULAC

Abstract

The JULAC consortium in Hong Kong has migrated individual ILSs to a shared ILS using Alma and Primo. The migration was intended to bring opportunities to enhance discovery, access, and efficiency in the digital lifecycle of a combined collection of over eighteen million from eight member libraries. A steering committee, an implementation team, and seven functional working groups, plus three project staff, conducted the implementation of the migration and change management of workflows. One major achievement is deep collaboration among libraries. Library staff, presented with the change vision when the project began, worked cooperatively to identify issues and find solutions in functional areas of acquisitions, metadata, electronic resource management, access, user experience, discovery, and system support. To prepare for the change, a series of as-is analysis and should-be redesign workshops were given on existing and new workflows. In eighteen months, varieties of 4,000 salesforce cases were opened for the vendor to provide solutions. There were major challenges that were eventually resolved over time, such as merging bibliographic records, data migration issues, and user account authentication. However, some critical issues on user-initiated borrowing (HKALL), CJK, and multilingual authority control are still being resolved with the vendor. The promise of electronic resource management has not yet been fulfilled. This panel discussion will start with a brief presentation on the background and implementation process. It will be followed by three panelists sharing achievements, challenges, and prospects both from institutional and consortium perspectives. They will also discuss the gaps in expectation and actual outcome.