 Hi. Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time, but if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We do record the show every week as we are doing today. And the show is then, the recording is then posted to our website for you to watch at your convenience. And I'll show you at the end of today's show how you can access and search through all of our archives. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So please share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think might be interested in any of the topics we have on our show, any of our upcoming shows as you see them there on the screen right now, or any of our archives. For those of you not from Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries in Nebraska. This would be in other states, the state library, they may be called. So we provide services to all types of libraries in the state. So you will find things on our show that are for all sorts of libraries, publics, academics, K-12, corrections, museums, archives, et cetera, et cetera. Really our only criteria for our show is that it's something to do with a library or libraries, something cool we think libraries are doing, something we think they could be doing. We have a Nebraska Library Commission staff that sometimes come on and do presentations for us about things we're doing here locally in Nebraska. What we bring on a guest speaker sometimes as well from outside, around Nebraska, around the country. And that's what we have with us for today. But before I go into today's show, I'm going to do a quick reminder for everyone. I'm going to pop over to our Library Commission webpage here. As everyone I'm sure know is aware, we are still in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and it is based on today's news only getting worse. More and more cases come, cases are increasing all across the country. We here at the Library Commission have a page here that we're keeping track of resources to help our libraries figure out how to deal with that in their locations. This post here is pinned to the top of our page. It will always be there, COVID-19 pandemic resources for libraries. We also are attempting to maintain a listing of mostly public libraries in Nebraska, who's open, who's closed, what special accommodations they may be making for people to receive any services that they may offer. On our pandemic page, we also have a link where libraries can report to us, Nebraska libraries, let us know what your situation is, some maps. But then we have a sub page here with some resources for you as a library to help your patrons in various different things, unemployment, financial help, what to do with my kids. But then the specific page here about libraries I wanted to highlight, we have a lot of information here that we gather and we're always updating it. Information, webinars, studies, research being done that may be of use to libraries. So keep an eye on this for us. We have special section for school libraries, special thing about help out meetings, board meetings. Now some of this information is specific to Nebraska, Nebraska statutes like the board, what board meetings can be done. So if you're not in Nebraska, check out your state library association or your state library and see if they may be offering you the same kind of information and resources. Some of many of the resources here though are just national or could be useful to anybody out there to use. So please do keep an eye on our page there for any information you may need about how to deal with the ongoing pandemic in your library. Let's get to today's show then. Now I'm going to click, here we go. Chris, I'm going to get your screen up first. I'm going to make you presenter. You should see a little pop up now that allows you to share your screen. Yes. There we go. And that went away. I'm trying to share my other screen. It should give you a choice of screen one and screen two. Are you seeing just the slide or are you seeing a bunch of stuff? We're seeing the power point presentation and not the slide. Okay. There you go. Now it is full screen. Awesome. Perfect. All right. So as I mentioned earlier, we do have guest speakers with us this morning. From just I'll say next door to Nebraska, Colorado. Carissa Brammer and Kate Gunther are from Colorado College. And they are going to talk to us today about what they did with moving to open source ILS at their library. So this would be great for academic libraries and really any library who may want to go open source. I know we have here in Nebraska a consortium of libraries, the pioneer consortium who are also on co-op. So some people here may be of great interest in what you guys have to say. So I'll just take it over, hand it over to you guys to take it over and tell us all about what you did. Okay. Do you want me to start, Kate? And then, because I know we share the first slide. Hi. Yeah, that's totally fine. We're both currently at, oh, I made it angry. There we go. It doesn't move again. There you go. Okay. So we're both currently at Colorado College. It is a small liberal arts college in Colorado Springs, Colorado. We have about 2,000 people on campus, slightly less right now. We have a relatively large collection at 822,000. And then we have a pretty high circulation for our size at 71,409. That was last year, I think. I don't know what we've had this year. It'll be really interesting. We have about 26 staff. So we are a very well resourced college. We are a member of the Oberlin group. So kind of with those other sort of selective liberal arts colleges. We, I think that partially our circulation is so high because we're on the block plan. So students take one class at a time for three and a half weeks that takes over basically their entire life. So these are people that are learning, you know, molecular biology in three and a half weeks, things like that. So there's a lot of pressure on students and a lot of pressure on staff. And I think that leads to a lot of use of our collection because they need something now that they can have in their hands today because their test is in two days rather than in, you know, when I was in college, my test was in six weeks. So I had time to mess around. There's also a lot of faculty support for the library. So that'll kind of factor into how our transition went, that our faculty are pretty supportive of the library, use it a lot. They will tell us when something's wrong, things like that. And as a comparison, the University of Montevallo, which is out of Montevallo, Alabama, just south of Birmingham, we had a slightly higher FTE at 2346 at the time, 218 instructional staff. Our total collection, including electronic, was 554,000 just over with a total circulation of 15,595, which is much lower than what Colorado College was saying. We were on a normal semester plan. We also had 13 staff in the library. I would say probably half of which actually spent significant amounts of time in the ILS. The other half of the staff spent very minimal amount of time working in the ILS other than searching for things like basically from the patronage. Many of our librarians did a lot of doubled up work. So we taught classes as well as, you know, ran systems or ran circulation or ran acquisitions and had a variety of other hats on campus. So we were spread quite then at the time I was working as the systems librarian and handled pretty much everything from the website to the ILS, the discovery tool, just about everything that touched computers. So yeah, many hats. There we go. Do you want to go first? I should have said yes to the last time, so I apologize for that. So with Montevall, we did have a really, really short timeline. There were a few motivations for this. We had a dying server that our ILS lived on at the time. We were with Horizon from Cersei Dynex and I'm pretty positive at the time. Not only was the actual physical server dying, but they were struggling to keep the software up to date. It was still on Microsoft 2004, Windows Server 2004. And the college was pushing to basically move to cloud services as much as possible. Cersei Dynex was also talking to us regularly about Blue Cloud. Horizon was something that they were not putting new customers on anymore and they were trying to move us over to either Symphony or to Blue Cloud services. So that prompted me to basically sit down and look at what our options were. So we began looking at systems for pricing in January of 2018. Fast tracked with just a few of us looking at these products. We were able to make a decision by June and implementation began a month later and was completed in September. So we were ready to go and ready to kill that server by the end of that year, which made our IT folks extremely happy. Okay. And then hours actually happened before my time. I started in 2019, but they sent information to several vendors. They pulled in, we were coming from millennium. So we got a Sierra quote. We got a couple of other larger for profit vendors to come in. I'm not sure which they brought in three for demonstrations. And then Kohak is supported by Buywater. And so they came in and did a demonstration. And not only was their demonstration apparently amazing, but also their price was the cheapest. So that helped a lot. The selection process went relatively quickly because there's no mandatory RFP process at Colorado College. So, which is very weird to me coming from state institutions to not have to do it RFP. You just decide on what system you want and then you say we want it and then you get it. The purchase was finalized in December 2018. And then I started January 21st, 2019. So that's when the implementation began. And then that implementation basically ran my entire professional life until July 22nd, 2019. The first part of it, I think was a lot of talking. They had been on millennium since, I believe 2004. So it was a system that was very entrenched. We had to figure out a lot of things about how the system works, things like that. And then, so that took about six months. I thought that that was like the fastest migration possible. And then I saw what Kate had done at Montevallo and I was like, okay, got it. Took forever. But that was the... To be fair, our collection size was significantly smaller and we did not have the majority of our electronic resources loaded into our catalog. So what we actually ended up migrating was about 220,000 items versus the 554 that was on the other page, or the 800,000 that I encouraged I was looking at with Colorado, not to mention the training of twice as many staffs. Yes. And our staff is, because it's a small institution, it's a place where people tend to spend a lot of time. Our staff was very attached to their workflows. And so I think that kind of coming in and saying we're doing something new was more difficult in this environment, especially because everybody's under so much pressure too, that you need to have an answer yesterday when someone sends you an email. And so messing up that for people was a little bit tough for them. These departments also were very good at solving their own problems. So I kind of just had to be like, this is the solution I need. And then they would figure it out. And then we looked at a lot of policies, things like that. So there was a lot going on, I think, that felt unique, but again, probably is the same in a lot of places. Oh no, I made it angry. I swear I know how computers work. They don't want to work whenever you want them to. Here we go. Okay. Perfect. Okay. So just to kind of give a little bit of perspective on where we were at Montevallo at the time, before we even started looking at different systems, I had just implemented EBSCO EDS. And that was, I think, probably in August of the year prior to making any sort of moves is looking at ILSs. Part of the motivation for that was that Montevallo hadn't already had a discovery tool and they were using WorldCat as their central search. So I moved them to EDS after recognizing that the majority of our products were EBSCO products. And so this would work very well with our electronic resources. And after having made that move, again, we were kind of looking at what systems we had that needed to also be considered for updating. So after recognizing that, again, we had a dying server that needed to be let go, we immediately started looking at our options. I first wanted to look at options that worked well with the discovery tool that we had just implemented. I also wanted to look at what would be a pretty minimal impact on our workers. Because as I said, we have such a small staff and we all were doing quite a few different jobs within our one job. I wanted this impact to be something that was very minimal and very easy transition for everyone. I was taking a look at the time. I believe Marshall Breeding's report had come out and I had been able to get ahold of his systems report for the year. And we basically narrowed it down to the most popular ILSs that were out there. And I had also had heard from a sales rep from COCAW. So I had put them down just as sort of a side. Let's check them out and see what they're looking like because they were mentioned in the report. After identifying the top ILS funders that we wanted to look at, which at the time was Cersei Dynaxis Blue Cloud, World Share Management Services from OCLC. And we briefly looked at triple I and ruled them out and then COCAW. So those were our top three was OCLC, Cersei Dynaxis and COCAW. At that point, we basically went through and tried to locate the closest institutions that were using those ILSs and did a couple of site visits. There was a local college that had World Share Management System. So that was pretty easy for us to go check out. And then a couple hours north of us in Huntsville, the public library system was using COCAW. So we were able to go and look at that. And Cersei Dynaxis, since we were already on horizon, they did a blue cloud demo for us, which allowed us to sort of see what blue cloud services would look like. After taking a look at all of those and looking at our cost off, we settled on COCAW for a variety of different reasons. The main points were the user friendliness of the system itself and the fact that they were going to host the collection for us. And we weren't going to have to worry about hosting it on a server in-house anymore. As a part of the selection process, I had talked to all of the librarians and staff members who worked in the ILS and asked for them to write out a list of things that they love about Horizon, things that they hate about Horizon, and if they could have a perfect system, what would the ideals of that perfect system be? And I basically put all of that feedback into a spreadsheet and sort of created a rubric for the system that we wanted. And luckily, again, COCAW, which was our top choice, fit the majority of the things that we were looking for and wanting out of the system. This also was our starting point for looking at the changes that we wanted to make to our records. For instance, location and item type changes. There were some things that have been in place for, I think, close to 20 years and locations didn't necessarily match up with the physical location in the library anymore. And so it made sense for this juncture for us to go ahead and start looking at making those changes. As part of the preparation for the migration, we went ahead and moved the EDS discovery layer to the front of our web page as far as trying to direct all of our patrons in through EDS. They were able to basically freeze and hold the way our catalog looked prior to migration up until we were satisfied with the way that everything was in COCAW. So we were able to have a little holdover where we didn't have to worry about our patrons not being able to find things. The worst situation I think that we ran into was just the fact that we wouldn't have real-time availability. So students weren't aware when something had been checked out, which with our circulation counts was a pretty rare experience. And let's see, we also did communications with our patrons via the library website, the campus email, and directly speaking to our more active patrons. So at Montaballo, we were in a small enough community that the folks that regularly checked out materials we knew on a first name basis pretty well. So it was easier for us to communicate to our community about the changes that were upcoming and everything went pretty smooth as far as that was concerned. And we migrated over one weekend in the middle of the semester. We planned for a go live on Sunday afternoon and I was actually the only staff member in the building at the time with a bunch of student workers. And so there were several minor bumps along the way as to be expected. System preferences changes were pretty much a constant for the first month or two of the change over. You know, somebody would come in, this looks funky, I need this to look different, I want this or I expect it to look like this. Luckily, there's a lot of customization options within COHA. And that made a world of a difference. I usually was able to turn that around real fast and say, well, here you go. It's changed and everybody would walk away happy. So we did discover as part of the migration that our fines were not right. And actually, let me make an aside real fast. Migrating away from Horizon was very difficult. We had our materials or our metadata and patron records were all on our server locally. However, Cersei Dynix was going to charge us quite a significant amount to export that data from our own server. Which working at a school that is underfunded a state school that irritated me. And so I wanted to try to find a way around this. And so I ended up teaching myself SQL because I figured out that the Horizon server and the Horizon database is all based on SQL. So after speaking with a couple of very, very nice support reps for Horizon who offered to show me some basics, I took a couple of classes online and was able to bypass their request for absurd amounts of money to export our patron data. But in that process, as excited as I was to learn SQL and figure out how to do this, I managed to get our spreadsheet off by one line for our patron fines and did not realize this until after we had loaded them into co-op, which was a nightmare. Trying to get that information fixed, exported back out, especially since it took us a few weeks to notice that many things that happened since then. So trying to not overwrite the basically the transactions that had happened since that migration while also fixing that information. It was very honor to try to get that fixed. So I do highly recommend anybody who's going through this process. If you do have a moment of triumph of figuring something out as far as how to export something always, always, always go back and triple check and make sure everything lines up correctly. Because you never know when something is just one line off how much of a headache it can cause. So moving along, we did have positive patron and student worker reactions. That was one of the things that I did appreciate the most about the migration process with this product was that our student workers that were there with me that Sunday who were dealing with the system for the first time with all of us, they were absolute champions and they loved it. For the most part, they, the user interface is significantly more user friendly than horizon. So trying to teach them how to check a book out to a patron took maybe five minutes whereas in horizon, you know, we would have an hour long session with the students to go over how the whole check in and check out process works. So this was significant difference for us in training time and just overall satisfaction with being able to use the system and knowing what you're doing. I will say that one of the major hurdles that we ran into with serial prediction patterns, which I think is probably not something that any system does well. And if there is one that does it well, I would love to see it. Please show me. Bywater, their product is, it's like many others in that it is not entirely pliable in the way that you would want it to be in setting up prediction patterns as any of you know, who work in electronic resources or having to do serial predictions in general, you know that not everything is on just a neat incremental time period. And every once in a while we get these weird supplemental issues or, you know, hey, we only get this five times a year and trying to set up a pattern for something that happens five times a year or 11 times a year is far more difficult than it should be. So prediction patterns was probably the biggest nightmare for me aside from getting the patron finds fixed. And lastly, we did system cleanup locations, item types and serials. So at that point, after we got everything migrated and we started to set up their serials as they came in, the maintenance that we had discussed or some of the changes that we had discussed wanting to make in this process was significantly easier to do on the co-hot end. So I had them migrate all of our materials as is and then spent the first several weeks going through and making mass location name changes and item type changes. And again, that was significantly easier to do in co-hot than it would have been in horizon. So yay. But yeah, that was the basics for our migration. I will say kind of as an aside that if you can hire someone who just went through this when you're doing it, I think that that's probably the best thing that we did because there are a lot of choices we were making where Kate was like, no, please don't. And then we would find a better solution. So just kind of as an aside. So I kind of went through immigration already because I got excited. The main thing that I would want to add is having a millennium system. We had a lot of issues. Our locations weren't actually necessarily tied to location. They were also doing a lot of circulation functions within the locations. And so splitting that out took 100 hours for me to get it from where the location was trying to do like location and circulation type and something else. I can't remember. I think I've walked it out. But trying to get those split out, I had to actually get a programmer to come in and write some spreadsheets for me. And it was very complicated. But then moving into, it went from, I think it was a 360 line chart for circulation rules to one now that I think is like 60, which is amazing. Like you open it and it's so simple and it says things. So that was the main issue. We did a lot of work with the departments to develop solutions. The only one that I had to do kind of on my own with just like brute force was that locations. One the rest, everybody I could kind of just hand it to them and they would handle it within their departments and then come back to solutions. And then updating policies was also sort of a trial because at a small liberal arts college, sometimes the policies are not written down. I don't know if that's true of all of them, but it's just like they just know. And that's not something that my brain will do. So getting those policies codified was pretty important part of it. So we had, I tend to like to schedule like big changes during the summer. So we set it at July 22nd and I was like, Oh yeah, I'll have a summer then. But it turns out that the summer at Colorado College is approximately two and a half weeks long. So we didn't necessarily have the time to fix issues. So I was going to ask because many universities that is definitely a good block of downtime, but not everybody. Yeah. Yeah. And I feel like I could see it on the calendar, but my brain didn't process it. That was very stressful. So the fourth to 16th bridge program, that's when we bring out some of our first students on to campus, be basically perfect by that point. We start having classes, things like that. So it was amount of time. We did have an issue that we thought we were going to have to migrate on July 1st because Millennium wanted an amazing amount of money that I'm not allowed to actually say because of NDAs, but they wanted an amazing amount of money for us to have an extra month of time on their servers. So we negotiated that down and were able to keep it to August 1st. And we did quite a bit of our data extraction before that, but it was nice having like the two week overlap, not even two weeks, eight days. So you time, I don't understand time anymore. So we tested the system between the 1st and the 22nd of July, essentially. And most people did their testing during this time. I think anyone who's ever done a major project, there was definitely a, some people didn't enter the system until it had gone live and then had issues and then we had to solve those things. So that's always something to look out for. And then the other thing that we did that was a really big change was to end the acquisitions May 15th and the cataloging processes July 1st. So that was a lot earlier than we normally would end. We do a lot of rush processing. So that was sort of tough for our community, but they rallied. Is this me? Yeah, that's all my stuff. Okay. I'm sorry. Did I skip something? No. Okay. So what works is having a host and support solution. We are a small college. Our systems department is me and one other person. So having that hosted solution was such a good thing because a lot of these problems we were, we were able to solve like conceptual problems and process problems in house and then have the system problems be someone else was coming in to help us. Having contacts and relationships within ITS, which is our central IT was really helpful. Getting the single sign-on setup was really complex and very hard. And we had one person in IT who had done this before with the library and it was a really good relationship to have. We have excellent communication with the college community at Colorado College. If there's an issue, faculty member will tell you or a student will tell you. And so that was super helpful. We used Basecamp, which is what this is to, for all of our project management, including, I believe, this is all of the issues that people had after launch is what we're looking at, sort of raises my blood pressure to look at that. And then we did a bunch of co-op open labs where people were able to come in and just work through problems together as a group. And I think that that was really helpful. But these have all been taken care of now, right? So you're all good. You're okay. There's actually a couple that are still issues, I think. But yeah, we've archived the project. And then what didn't work well is many people felt that internal communication wasn't done properly, which I think is always an issue with projects. So I think I would just recommend that everybody communicate to the point that they think they're overwhelming people and then do more. Caz integration is what I was just talking about, our single sign-on. That Caz integration is what finally at the very end of this project made me cry because when we went live, no one could log into the system. And that lasted for 10 days before we could figure it out because of the way that our student information is managed within our system and within Banner. So it's not great. GOBE API is now working. This is an older slide. So GOBE API works. Labeling was tough, and that's something we're still working through. Prospector, oh, that's so cute. It was aiming for January 2020. Prospector is still not working. Prospector is our local consortium with all of the libraries within the state of Colorado, essentially, all of the academic libraries at least. And when we moved away from millennium, we had to move to an API with Triple I, and that API was under development and is still under development. So we're hoping maybe January 2021, here, getting later this month. So we're still working on that as a development partner. It's taking a lot longer. But when we're done, we're hoping that consortia that have a lot of COHA libraries will be able to connect into this system. And so we're going to, once this is done, we're going to be able to bring, I think, all of the rest of the public libraries in the state of Colorado into one system for rapid ILL, essentially. That's good. That's what's good about open source. So much, a lot of the work that's done like this, developing something is then available for other libraries and other consortiums groups to use. Yes. It's not just for us and our little special case. It's like, we're creating this thing and it'll work and fix your issues or make your thing work. But then also, anyone else who might have the same situation, look at what these guys did, grab the code, see what you can, you know, and it's partially done, ready for you to go. Yeah. Yeah, it's awesome. And well, bringing in the other COHA libraries is going to be really cool, I think. Yeah. And then cereals processing was difficult. It still is. We're still having a few issues with that. And then, Kate, I thought you had some, what worked? So I'm just going to let you, no? No, I think, so since a lot of our stuff got resolved before I left, yeah, we didn't have any. What worked and didn't work. I tried to include that more in the migration process, because yeah, some of it didn't work. Okay. And this photo, I should give a little context. At the end of this, we had a party where as a part of good data stewardship, we destroyed all the hard drives from millennia. And so we had cameras and it was a lot of fun. I recommend having a party after a transition. It is surprisingly difficult to smash hard drives, but people have enough strong feelings, they will get it done. Yes. Get all of your frustrations that you've just dealt with over the last however much time, years sometimes, take it out on the right place. And that's it. I highly recommend safety goggles. Shrapnel fly. Something you don't usually think about that you need to include in your budget for upgrading something is safety goggles. Yes. Yeah. Blood tamers. Have your sledge than you would think you would need. That maybe, yeah. That's all we have. Anybody have any questions? Let's see here, yeah. If anybody has any questions, definitely take them into the question section. If you want to know any more about any of the part, we can pop back to any of the slides and expand on anything if you want to. Anybody's either done this at your institution and want to share some of your tips and tricks and thoughts, or if you're thinking about doing it and have some more specific questions, get them in right now. Yes. Emily who's watching says, I love smashing the equipment. This is what I was thinking of too. Reminds me of the printer scene in office space. Yes. The classic destroy that horrible printer that just hates everyone. Okay, here we have a question. Good question. Did you do lots of weeding prior to migration? Try and make it less stuff, less data to have to migrate? Was there a major weeding project ahead of time, or is that something that you just did your usual? Well ours, there was a weeding project because we, the year before this happened, they rebuilt the library. And so my understanding is that there was a huge weeding project then. And that had already been done as part of another process. So we didn't, I don't think there was one specifically for this. We didn't do any, I did one just because this was happening, because you happened to have had done that just recently. Yeah. We did go through, someone had been trying to catalog the internet. So there was like a catalog record for Google. So I did go through and remove several of those records prior to the move, but that was the only weeding process that was specifically there. That sounds like something left over from like the 90s or something maybe that somebody thought, oh yes, this is an electronic resource we need to, and then yeah, it's not that anymore. At Montevallo, we did ongoing weeding every year. There was a new collection that they selected and did weeding in. So we didn't do any specifically for this project. I will say I forgot to mention, as part of the cleanup process, and I just had a flashback to this. We, since we were such a small library, there were only two people that did cataloging, one person that did our like original cataloging for things that were college created or student created. And then we had a copy cataloger who didn't have necessarily formal cataloging training. And the copy cataloger did a lot of our ebooks. And so as part of the cleanup and the migration process for me, I went through and cleaned up the 856 fields. Because as a part of the copy cataloging, they brought over all of the links from OCLC, which if any of you catalog thing, you know that probably 95% of those did not work for us. So going through and doing that, and then of course, prepending the proxy to the ones that do work and so forth. So that was a significant part of the cleanup from the migration process for us. I know that was kind of off topic, but it was still sort of part of the things you don't want to bring over, you know, yeah. Things I would have wished I prepared for. So there'd be potentially both types of weeding, the actual physical get the stuff out, so we don't even have those records. And then are these records have extra stuff that just doesn't need to be don't bring it over because it didn't wasn't helpful in the first in our original system. We definitely wanted a new one. Oh, yeah. Well, it was the first day that I came across a page of results in Koha that had one item that had probably somewhere in the ballpark of like 60 or 70 URLs underneath it. That was the day that I said, this needs to be taken care of. It's a new project I need to do now. Absolutely. All right, a couple more questions here. Katie wants to know, did you ever look into Alma as an option? I did at Montevallo. Alma was not in our price range. Not even close. Maybe for the larger, a larger system or university. Yeah, and also some context Montevallo is the only public liberal arts college in the state of Alabama. We were horribly underfunded. So our budget to move in this process, we actually ended up cutting our ILS costs, I believe, in over half. So that was actually really, really nice for us as a library. But when we got quotes for the other services that I will say money was a significant part of our decision making. And that's the difference between being a public university and private to sometimes private institution would have more funds to go towards something as well. So it's all yeah, it definitely is important to look into because a lot of these systems are just as good. Yeah. So another question and that you may, you guys may or may not know this, but they won't, we'll see. Someone says I've heard COHA can be more difficult for academic libraries than public. What is your opinion on that? I know here in Nebraska, as I mentioned at the beginning, we do have a pioneer consortium, which is using COHA. And they are all public libraries, except for one of our community colleges, I believe, isn't it? Academics have not joined into that. So here it's all publics. You guys are are academic. What do you guys think? Or would you know? I think I would agree it is more designed for public. Yeah. I don't know if it's an academic library, I would come in and do this unhosted at all. So one of the things that we did was we were the largest, I believe, academic library going on to COHA with by water at that time. So a lot of customizations, they've done a lot of like fixing processes and things like that for us. And so I think having by water was the most important part of that for us, because we would say, okay, this doesn't make sense for us. And they would come in and design something that would do it. So I think, yeah, having good support like that, yeah, and then they know if they have staff on hand that know this is what a public library would need, but this is an academic. So we've got to think about it differently. And we can do that, you know, having that. And I know we've had I've seen across the Internet of colleagues talking about having some of these open source and COHA, there are different companies behind the scenes you can go with to support that. And some are better for some people and some say no, these guys were not good for us. But in your case by water is great. So you got to think about that as well as like maybe interviewing them to say, Kev, you can you guys do this because we're an academic rather than a public if they get you. Yeah, I would say that they definitely were more geared initially for public libraries. But I think as time has gone on over the last like maybe five or six years, that that has changed significantly. If I'm not mistaken, they also took on, is it Virginia? Is it University of Virginia? There was a system up in Virginia that they took on as well. Virginia Tech. Virginia Tech, thank you. That I believe has helped further the development of things that are a little bit more related to academic libraries. And again, they are not paying me or anything. That company by water is amazing. I've never had, I've never dealt with a company that was as responsive as them. As far as like if I reached out to them about like, hey, I don't know how to do this and I need help. It was within minutes, I would get a response. They invited me to their Slack channel pretty much right off the bat. And that was one of those things. I cannot even begin to describe the difference between working with one vendor and then buy water. Yes. It was almost like having somebody in-house from buy water because they were so responsive. So it was a specific person that was always your person or did it change? They had, I think at least one or two specific people that dealt with us directly. And then we had our own. Yes. We talked to them about this six months ago and the same person is still knows what we don't have to re-explain to the new, the new person. Yeah. That's important. So I think, yeah, I think people may have thought of historically COHA for publics, but it's changed. It's been used now by enough academics that it can totally work that way. And we know we've got people that can make that happen just as easily as for a public. So I think it's useful for everybody now. Let's see. We've got a couple more questions coming in. Go ahead and keep typing your questions. We have plenty of time for them. Laura wants to know. Let's see. This is a longish one. Is this system pretty robust? I went from a library that used Cersei workflows, which I personally loved, but is so expensive, to a library that uses OCLC WorldShare, which I'm having issues with and looking at changing from. So how would you... I'm giggling a little bit just because I worked at a library that implemented WorldShare and I completely understand. I like to think that COHA is significantly more robust. I honestly ran into very few things that the system couldn't do that I wanted it to do. Serials prediction patterns being like at the top of that list. But really, it's pretty dang robust from where I sit. But then again, I haven't spent a lot of time doing more advanced functions within the ILS. So I'm going to pass that to Chris. I think cataloging wise, yes. I think it's as robust as any other system. For us as an academic, the acquisitions functions were extremely simple compared to what we had. And they're designed for you enter a budget and then you purchase from that budget. And we have, I want to say, 90 different funds that we assign things into because it's all gift funds. And I think that's common in academics, the library we were in before, all of our funds were split out by department. And that complexity was a little bit difficult to figure out. We almost paid for the development of another acquisitions module, which is something that you can do through Bywater. It would have cost $15,000 to completely redevelop the acquisitions module. But instead of doing that, our acquisitions folks just got together and were able to make the system work. And so I think it felt less robust, but it definitely does everything that we need now. Yeah. And then you can decide, do we pay the extra or do we do some sort of in-house? We'll figure it out. Yeah. Here's a good question. Katie wants to know, what would be, what would you say is the biggest drawback to COHA for you? So let's do the cons maybe. Oh, I know. And it's actually one that they're fixing right now. So the one is they are using an older form of search that is not as, we can't even influence the search, but they're moving, it's zebra search if anyone cares, but so it's just a really fixed thing. We can't go in and wait items. But moving right now, they're in testing to move to Elasticsearch, where we will be able to go in and wait different things and kind of make the work in the way that our people expect. That's something that I did a lot in like, they have Elasticsearch. And so you can go in and I, if I know nature wasn't really working and no one could find it, so I could put that at the top, things like that. And I think it would be a really big thing. But that was probably the biggest drawback is it's just an extremely simple out-of-the-box search. Yeah. I think that was one of the things that I had actually told the folks at Colorado College, funny enough I've got a phone call from them as soon as I had finished up the migration at Montevallo asking how it went and if I would be willing to talk about it. And I think that that was one of the things that I had mentioned was that we were not intending on sending any of our patrons to COHA to search for items. Our discovery layer was the only way to search for items that was immediately available from the web page. And that was mainly because the search function within COHA was not ideal. So since we were sending all of our catalog records to EBSCO to include an EDS, that was our way of making our items discoverable. Placing holds, checking out items, doing the things within COHA that you would do as a patron if you found the item that you were looking for is smooth from where I stand. But if you're trying to find something or doing like a known item search sometimes that can be really problematic. And yeah hopefully Elasticsearch will fix a bunch of that. But yeah. And like I said they're responsive so that's good. Yeah. All right a couple other questions here from Nicole. That's about your staff. And you indicated your staff numbers and I think was 13 and 26. Are you including student workers in that number or just are those you have extra student workers on top of what you have listed there? So for Montevallo we only had 13 staff people and that was not including student workers and one of those was not full-time. And ours is I think we have out of the 26 I think like 15 or full-time and then the rest are very versions of part-time. And that includes the student workers. I think we probably if I had to guess pre-COVID we had I think 18 to 20 student workers across in addition. Most of them are in circulation. Yep typical yeah. And then one more question here. If anybody has any other ones get them typed in there. Also does COHA have an annual fee or contract? How does that actually work? And I know you had mentioned NDA about cost and whatnot but it just as a general how does it work to have them be your support? So my understanding whenever we signed on with them was that the and we signed on with Bywater as support. Right it was when we Bywater was to COHA yeah. Yes we we paid Bywater for support and hosting and that was it. So the product itself if you have people in house to administer it is free as far as I understand and there's not any annual fees for that. I could be wrong. Right and yeah COHA itself being that's what open sources it's out there and you can if you have someone in house who can do it and do the coding and do what you need to. There is no cost by the time of the person you already have in house but any sort of contract or something with a company would be hiring Bywater or someone else to actually do that support you don't have the in-house people. And I caution people to believe that you have the in-house people like I don't know your staff but it is it ended up being about a third of what we would normally pay for another for the hosting and for the service around a third of what a what a cost for another proprietary system. So it's still relatively expensive and unless you're a really large system with a lot of IT folks like the cost of having people dedicated to this is going to be more than what the cost of the system is. And do you know is it an annual thing you guys pay or I assume because they're ongoing helping you there's some sort of annual maintenance cost to keep them on board as your support. We pay them annually we did also paid extra probably half or no probably double what this was for um not half again um migration so there was the extra cost that was here. Yeah I'm just looking up ah yeah all right uh because then okay this person's got it I think so I remember checking into Koha many years ago um and LibLime was the support and that's another company you can go with to be your support for Koha if you want to as buy water is another one there's other ones out there I don't recall what our local consortium is going with I think it's even another one but yeah right um oh and now here's another question that popped in do either of your libraries use Koha for course reserves and if so do you have positives and negatives for that. So Montevallo did use course reserves I think that it was running pretty well I think we had even gotten to the point where some professors were controlling that themselves and able to go in and select books that they wanted to put on hold for classes and so forth so. Something you can do faculty can do themselves that's that's just amazing I used to work in a university library before I was here at the Library Commission so awesome that is amazing um we do use it for reserves my understanding is it's much easier than Millennium was for setting up reserves um it was extremely easy to turn reserves off when COVID happened so that was nice um yeah things that we're finding is when we have to make these on-the-fly changes like that it's really easy to go in and out of those systems. That's the thing that I think about Koha is some of these more like you're mentioning proprietary systems a lot of it is you've got to go to them and have them make the fix and it takes time and I think with Koha you have more instant local control that you can make some changes really quickly and a lot easier a lot more easily. Yeah I think so we just this week we had to turn holds on for our reference books so that people could use them in the building because we're not allowing people to use the stacks and that was a really easy change I think which maybe it would be easy in other systems too but it was awesome we're getting close to the top of the hour again um here it's at 10 59 central time of my clock um if you have any other questions go ahead and get them typed in we'll stay on here as long as we need to get all your questions answered um we do have one comment here says thank you this has been super helpful and they would love to reach out and learn more if possible um they are considering switching um I'm considering switching my ILS in the future and um yeah I'll be having college here yeah so um I don't know I can't remember way back in the beginning did you guys have your contact info on the slide in the beginning or we did not okay I do have let's see here I just want to say don't hesitate to share my email I'm happy to speak with anyone and coloradocollege.edu it's pretty easy to find us coloradocollege.edu slash library yeah that's I was looking at yeah here to see okay yeah I will when I switch over to mine yeah I do have when we put up the um session info for this pay this today show and when the recording goes up I've got a link to the the library's website and I'll show you when we get over there there's a section where you can get to all the staff contact info and find you guys on there so absolutely reach out yeah and Nicholas says yes thank you so both so much any other last minute desperate questions you want to ask right now before we do wrap up or anything else um you guys Chris or Katie you want to share I will get my screen up here make sure I get the right screen okay oh yeah so here's the session info for today's show and this will be the same info you'll have when I put the recording out here's where I've got a link to the library's page and I just looked over here under about there's a staff section um and if you scroll down enough and then you can just search this to um contact info for everybody I know where you guys are on here you guys know hey look there and that will you see bring up right her email address and where are you under here all right I could have done a search on the page but I did the old passion way of just scrolling and looking so I appreciate that I was trying to show you and then panic so you're doing a much better job so yeah so right there you can reach out to either one of them for more information and when you're wanting to do your migrations it doesn't look like we have any other last any other emails been typed in so I think we will wrap it up for today thank you guys so much for being both of you for being here with us today I'm glad we're able to get you on the show and talk about this I know a lot of over the years libraries are moving to open source or just anything better than what they have um and especially in academic libraries it's it's a big deal I know from as I said previous experience so thank you so much this was great thank you for having us yeah and thank you everybody for attending um we as I said we are recording the show and it will be available by the end of this week I'll go to our main encompass live page if you use your search engine of choice to just search for encompass live the name of our show so far it's the only thing on the internet called that nobody else is allowed to use that name and you will find our website we have our upcoming shows here and our archives link is just beneath those and the most recent shows will be at the top of the list there will be a link to the recording and I can also link to your slides if you guys I didn't know if you had decided how you wanted to do your slides if you're going to host them somewhere or just send it to me I can put them on our slide share whichever you prefer okay and we'll put a link to those as well while we're here on the archives I'll show you we do have a search feature you can search our full archives if you want to or just the most recent years worth most recent 12 months that is because this is our full show archives encompass live premiered I'm not going to scroll all the way to the bottom because this is a huge page encompass live premiered in January 2009 so we have over 10 years worth of recordings here so we have a search you can search for any topics or you can limit if you want something just current and new just do the most recent recent 12 months if you just want to search the whole archive just pay attention to the original broadcast date we always have the dates here so you know when it first came out some of the information on these shows may be old outdated incorrect links might not work anymore companies might not exist anymore so just pay attention to what the you know the subject of the of the show is but some things will you know stand the test of time best new teen books of 2017 they're probably still good teen books even though it's 2020 now but things like google forms from 2017 stuff might have changed since then so keep that in mind but we are a library we archive things and keep things for historical purpose and use purposes and we will always keep our full archives up there for you that's why we have this great search feature we also do have a facebook page i've got a link here i've got to open over on this side if you do like to use facebook you can give us a like over there and we announce when new things are coming up here's a reminder log into today's show information about our speakers last week's recording so we always keep things up on there we also use twitter and instagram to put up announcements and we use the hashtag as you might have seen in the intro slides of n comp live so you can always look that up anywhere else social media wise i'm gonna see what we're doing the show since i'll wrap it up for today i'll hope you join us next week when our topic is pretty sweet tech computers and libraries 2020 greatest hits pretty sweet tech is our monthly session done by amanda sweet our technology innovation librarian here at the nebraska library commission usually the last wednesday of the month is her show and she's on something tech related and she did attend this year the virtual computers and libraries 2020 conference which is a combination of computers and libraries and internet librarian so she's going to highlight some of the fable some of the cool things she saw there at the conference so do i'll sign up for next week's show and any of our other shows we have coming up over the next couple of months i'll get things scheduled all the way into december so other than that that wraps up today's show thank you everyone for being with me this here this morning and hopefully we'll see you on a future episode of encompass live bye