 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event. Yes, we are a webinar. You can call us that. We won't be offended by it. We'll cover a variety of any library topics and interests. The show is free and open to anyone to watch, both our live show on Wednesday mornings and our recordings. We do these sessions live every Wednesday at 10 a.m. central time, but if you are unable to watch them, join us live on Wednesdays. That's fine. You can go on to our website and find all of our recordings for all of our previous sessions. We do a mixture of things here, presentations, book reviews, interviews, mini-training sessions, basically anything related to libraries we are happy to have on the show. We have a Nebraska Library Commission staff that do presentations sometimes, but we also bring in guest speakers as we have this morning. On the line with us this morning is Andrew Sherman from the Summit Memorial Library up in Papillion, Nebraska. They've just recently, in the last couple of years, I'm not sure how long it took on through a big change, getting a new ILS for their library, with a bunch of other libraries joined in as well. He's going to just take us through how they pulled it off. Go ahead and take it away, Sherman. Hi, everybody. Jeremy, okay? Yep. You sound good. Okay. As Chris said, I'm the IT coordinator of some of our library. Almost two years ago, we joined the Pioneer Consortium when we realized that our fall at ILS was not meeting our needs. We had concerns about the old server it was running on, and we knew we needed to migrate to something new. As part of our membership to the consortium, I've been assisting a lot of libraries that have joined us and helped them review the co-ILS from PPFS. We use our ILS in the consortium, and also, if they've chosen to go with this, I've helped a lot of small libraries through their migration effort. From that, I've kind of put together kind of a best tips and practices. So if you're a library that's got an ILS that's out of date, not meeting your needs, or what's commonly we've dealt with as part of the Pioneer is the library's got their ILS running on a creaky old server that nobody knows if it's going to last much longer, and nobody's really sure if it's even being backed up correctly and things like that by moving to a cloud-based ILS like what we utilize where our vendor maintains all that force out in their data center and we access it over the internet, allows us to kind of get out of the risk of where our ILS runs on a single server, and if that server quit working, then we're pretty much out of business. So we'll just go through some of the stuff that we've uncovered over our experience. So the way to kind of look at the migration process is really you could treat it like a move. Instead of physically packing up stuff in boxes and moving it to a new location, it's more of a digital move where you're going to be packing up the information in your current ILS and we're going to be moving it to the new one. Obviously it's a lot of work and for a lot of us we have our full-time jobs and the library has to be fully operational for our patrons while we're doing this, which makes it both disruptive and stressful just like you know if you're buying a new house, you're trying to move your family into a new home, well you still got everyday life to deal with on top of this. So you got to concentrate on the positive and remember the good reasons why you're doing this, what's important, how it's going to benefit you, what makes all this work and effort worth it. We kind of see it as kind of a four-stage process. So there's a selection of the new ILS you're going to go for. There's the preparation for the move, then the migration of the move itself and then kind of once you're past the you know the initial up and running on the new system, you definitely want to circle back and see what's working, what's not. You know what you can do to make things work better, take advantage of the features of the ILS that you didn't have before. Selection, in our case and with a lot of the libraries I've worked with, it really doesn't come down to you know all the ILS's pretty much have the same features. Some have a few more bells and whistles than others, but most of the libraries I've dealt with have been fall-at libraries who have not even kept their fall-at up to date and are years behind in the capabilities even fall-at offers. So really at this point a lot of the libraries are kind of the point where just about anything is going to be better than what they're currently using. The other thing we've really discovered that cost tends to be the driver here. You know some libraries have a few features that are important to them that they like, but it really seems to all come down to cost and as we've been working with libraries as part of the consortium it's kind of interesting is depending when the library lasts purchased in ILS you can almost kind of figure out who had the most affordable product on the market. So if you know they went between these few years they're all fall-at libraries. If they went through these few years they're all sagebrush libraries. So they really seems it was driven by you know who had the most affordable solution. The other thing we commonly see is you know what do the neighbors have. So it's a like you know if your lawnmower dies you've got to get a new one. You see you look them down the street on Saturday morning and see what kind of lawnmowers your neighbors have. We see a lot of libraries that are in the same area and maybe work closely together tend to use the same ILS also because it allows them to support one another. So you know if you have a library with a long-term staff and then maybe you have some retirements and stuff when those that new staff into that library are able to kind of pick the brains of the libraries around them if they're you know coming in and learning to learn a new ILS is part of the new job. Another really things you know if the vendor has kind of a play space or something where you can kind of go out and they give you a login to a demo version of the product where you can actually kind of go through the motions of how it's going to work in your library and see whether you like it or not. You know give it a test drive. The big big thing is to be aware that really there's I can't really see any reason why any library especially Smallwood would want to have a server-based ILS where they're responsible for maintaining the server and having it in-house. I'm sure you've all heard the buzzword the cloud. It kind of has a little different connotation now but pretty much what we call software the service SaaS is not new it's been around for a long time. That's the idea is you buy the vendor's product and then they actually host it for you in one of their data centers and they take care of all the hardware in that work and you're really only dependent on your internet connectivity to get out there and make use of it. So it gets you out of the the responsibility for the the backup and you know the hardware with server itself. The critical thing there is of course make sure you pick a vendor that's that solid financially is going to be around for a while and you don't have to worry about you know they would suddenly close the door and got a business and your ILS is no longer there which shouldn't be an issue. Most vendors with all the mergers and acquisitions that are out there now are pretty solid. Again it takes care of the backup stuff for you and then the thing to understand that it's in this situation most of these ILSs now have an interface through the browser. So the browser is your face of their product and for example the in the Pioneer Consortium the preferred browser buy vendor is Firefox and I know some libraries where their IT management is by the city sometimes there's some very very strict security requirements where the city won't allow any other browser than say internet explore things like that. So that's something that you really want to be aware of that if you know if your vendor says you know we test and we expect you to use this browser a Firefox or a Chrome or Safari or an internet explorer is the expected browser to front into our product you need to make sure that it's going to be okay to use that and that it's something you can install and use on your computers. Again when the ILS is based out in the cloud your connectivity is good as your internet connection so if you're a library possibly in a rural area where your internet connection is not very fast or you know goes in and out a lot that's something to consider that maybe you know unfortunately the cloud's not going to work for you based on your internet connectivity you need to have it hosted on the server in-house that's not near the issue it used to be but hopefully you'll be able to take advantage of the cloud setup and you have a good enough internet connectivity to support that. On preparation again you know if you fail the plan you plan to fail I'm sure we've all heard that before and it's just like a move if you've helped if you've done moves in your own you've helped friends move you know the move that where everything's planned out the boxes are packed and clearly labeled you know it's easy to tell where things are going and how it's going to get done makes for a much less stressful move than if you just kind of you know just go for it and just throw stuff in a in a truck and try to get it across town to the new house. Same thing here the better you can plan and be prepared for it and have everybody knowing what they're doing and when it just takes a lot of the stress and in agony out of the workout. It's an inventory a really really good thing to do would be to complete an inventory before the migration ILS so you kind of know what you have and you know you know what what you're bringing over to the new ILS so if your current ILS has issues with the data just because you're going to a new ILS that's not going to go away you will bring those those problems with you so you know it's the idea of different dogs saying please if you have issues with the data in your old ILS and you're migrating to the new ILS and you don't fix that stuff first you're kind of going to still be dealing with the same issues in the new one. The other thing is what we call is extraction or extract. Do you know how or do you have support from your vendor to get that data out of your old ILS and files that can be easily imported into the new ILS and this is also a really good time a lot of times part of that migration this is an opportunity to maybe those issues with your data we talked about this is a good opportunity maybe to work for your ILS vendor and maybe sneak in some mass updating or mass changes is part of this extraction and import process to clean stuff up if you don't know what a mark record is you need to know what a mark record is because this is the language that everybody will be talking about when they're moving your collection from one ILS to another. Mark is the standard and that's what they're going to be talking is mark records and mark fields so the more you know about it the more knowledgeable you are the better it will go. The other thing that was new to me when we moved that I didn't realize until we started our research is there is kind of an international 14-digit barcode standard for both the barcodes on your patron cards and the barcodes on your items. The ILS we went to has the expectation of you're using that standard now fortunately for us our vendor ppss has added some additional features that allowed us to retain our old partial fallout barcodes we didn't have to read barcode everything as part of our migration we were able to add some take advantage of the feature where by programming our scanners to drop some of the problematic stuff when we scan an item or patron's card I'm ILS would then fill it with the the prefix in the zero fill that produced the true 14-digit number or code as it went into the ILS so we didn't have to be a bunch of relabeling depending on what vendor you pick with and where you go that's something to be aware of you know do they expect you to support a 14-digit standard or do they support the standard that you have in your library for how your barcodes are set up and can they make it work really nobody wants to have to go through the the workout of relabeling their collection to conform to a different standard or barcoding from their ILS vendor the other thing we discovered was because we had been with fallout for a number of years and they had done obviously different philosophies on how their barcoding worked through the years and then even acquisition and merger of other ILS vendors into their system we discovered that what was printed on our barcode was not actually in the human readable part of the barcode was not what was actually in the barcode and we really ran into an issue where we thought we were going to have to seek out these really old barcoded books and relabel them but what was again nice with a combination of programming our barcode scanners to toss stuff out and then the the prefixing feature that call had we were able to resolve those problems and it was nice I used to be a barcode programmer back in the day so I had a lot of knowledge and experience in that if I hadn't we really might have been in a bad spot and not even realized that programming our scanners was even an option to us and I wound up helping a lot of libraries with acquiring used programmable scanners that we could then program to solve the same issues they had with fallout barcodes that we had. Another great opportunity here and you know obviously it's a you know the migration ILS that feel like you have enough going on that you don't want to take on you know a reorganization library where you want to change your shelving method which might involve changing spine labels on your books for your shelving how do you do your shelving codes you know by author name or or Dewey or that we had a kind of a weird setup in our our children's picture books where everything's were categorized into holiday books it was just kind of a weird deal it made it very difficult for patrons to locate what they wanted so we decided as part of our migration we redid all the spine labels and call numbers for the books in our our children's picture book section so it was all based you know kind of the standard method of doing non-fiction off the author name so it made it much easier to find stuff and what made it this the time to do that is we were able to incorporate those those changes as part of the transfer of our data from our old ILS to our new ILS we were able to extract the data out of the old ILS work with the programmers at PPFS to go in and write a little program that modified those call numbers to what we wanted them to be and then so we went live on the new ILS we had team volunteers come in and assist us with reorganizing our picture book section and it it was kind of the problem nobody wanted to take on because we're going to be so much work but by incorporating it into the migration of our ILS we actually were much more efficient yet we're going to have to do a lot of this anyway so this was a great time to take that on and fix it um policy changes because the ILS is such an important part of the library um that workflow and how you do things really is based on you know how your ILS does things so if you've been on you know a vendor's ILS for years and years and years kind of the the operating procedure the process you used to check a book out check a book and do holds and that really is based on how that flow works through your ILS so going to a new one um you could see a significant change in and maybe how you do your holds and things like that and then that gets back to um you know what kind of rules are allowed for fines how fines are calculated and things like that especially if you join a consortium where everybody's you know sharing the same ILS database you may have to conform to how the rule how the consortium set their standards for when do we decide an item is lost how do we charge fines things like that and that may change be different from how you do it currently resulting in a policy change and a lot of libraries you have to go to your library board and have those policy changes approved so that's something you definitely want done long before you're ready to do the the migration you want to figure out okay the consortium the books been overdue for three weeks um the ILS were on considers it lost you know if it used to be you would give the patron three months before you mark their item is lost and charge them for it that's going to be a policy change you may need to have board approval to affect that so keep that in mind another thing to think about is depending how many people you have to come in and help with this migration and move and how long it will take the vendor to actually get you live on the new ILS should you close for a day do you need to close for a day our libraries open seven days a week and there really wasn't you know a day that we could do this where we weren't going to impact patrons monday tends to actually be our slowest day so we chose to close on a monday and then what we did is when we wrapped up business sunday at five we extracted all of our current data from the old ILS uploaded it to our vendor to then begin the migration to the new ILS and then while they were doing that overnight then we came in early monday morning and we did all of our validation and checks to make sure the data came through clean and properly and then we had some stuff to fix we had a little you know there's always a few issues to clean up but then we had a nice solid clean ready to go ILS we're back in business on Tuesday patron communication this is huge you don't want to just do something like this where the you know if you have patrons that actively maybe log in from the computer at home to do place holds or renew books obviously with the new ILS the interface your patrons have or the real pack screen for them is going to change and things will be different we started communicating a year out to our patrons that we were going to be migrating to a new ILS and as we learned more and could share more details we did that and we even offered training ahead of time to our patrons using a sandbox or a testing version that our vendor provided for our ILS where we were actually able to have our patrons come in and we could show them what the new ILS was going to work and train them on how to do renewals and holds before we were even live on it yet we did that a couple weeks out and we did classes afterwards too and that was the same sandbox the same tool we used to train all the staff on the new ILS before we moved ahead so migrating how we test and train I just talked about the sandbox this is a huge huge feature the idea and we had some libraries we helped migrate where they did not take the time train their staff on the new system they literally were on the old system one day and the new system the next and the staff were figuring it out as they went along that works but I don't recommend it was very very stressful and very very painful so make sure your vendor has the ability for you to train on a system ahead of time what was nice about what PPFS provided to our consortium is we actually were able to do a kind of a test migration where we were able to bring all of our data over into the sandbox environment and see what came over correctly what didn't so we knew about those before we did the actual live migration and then we were able to actually train our staff and they're able to train on our our catalog our items so we weren't using somebody else's stuff that was maybe set up a little different we were actually able to train our staff on how this was going to work based on how we catalog and classify and shelf our items gets back where I talked about earlier that you know the system really defines your workflow one of the things we really really liked about COHA overall fallout system was the old fallout system we would have an item come in you check it in and you had a hold on it we were writing out paper hold slips the PPFS system principal hold slip where you possible screen you hit okay and a principal hold slip with all that information on it you just pick up the book and put on the shelf so it changed our workflow in a good way the staff really really like that feature but it did change you know how we handle our holds a little bit different on testing I don't know if any of you have heard of test decks it's kind of a common practice in the programming world and quality assurance for software where you have the database loaded with kind of a known setup so if you run reports these are the totals you expect to see of things like that and then a test deck would basically be okay I'm gonna I'm going to catalog an item so here's the steps I take a b c b e and that was your test deck for cataloging so you when you were ready to get in the sandbox and start training and and testing you could run through these test decks over your your commonly done practices so you saw how things work you could identify an issue if there was one that it could get fixed and those test decks then leave right into creating the training documentation or training aids for your staff we required all of our staff to be able to do all the common tasks in the sandbox and they were tested on it so for example our aids their supervisor they had to sit down and supervisor said okay let's check the book out let's check the book in let's put a book on hold and they actually had to go through that in the sandbox and show that they they do how to do it and could do it without you know any confusion or slowness or anything like that so we were ready to go day one I can't stress the training ahead of time enough it just it's going to solve so many problems right up front make everything run so much smoother eliminate your drama gets the staff to buy in they get a chance to kind of get over their apprehensions before then and then again we offer training sessions for our patrons I will share though that we scheduled a lot of training classes for our patrons and we had very low participation in it and then after we were live on the new one they were coming in saying can you show me how to do this so then we kind of go back on one-on-one going over one of the opac computers and showing them how to do it one-on-one after the fact which was fine the people wanted help got it and worked towards once you actually migrate these test decks are a great way to then do your checking confirmation so if you had a test deck based on a report you were going to run so we should see these kind of numbers come out for what's on hold what our fine totals and things are so we could take a of the fine report from fallette on our old system and then compare it to the fine report we got out of the migrated data over to our co-host system and those numbers should match if they don't then you know right away something is not migrated cleanly and you need to dig into it and find out what's wrong so you know having a standard having your standard set of reports that you use with your old ILS and then running those standard reports as part of the migration on your new ILS and preparing those numbers is a great great way to check and see the results and make sure everything came through cleanly once you're through your migration this is where you really want to kind of follow up so you want to basically you know kind of sit down get everybody around the table if you can and say okay we're there we're on the new ILS you know what what went well you know what was what was what worked what didn't work did we run any good surprises which are great did we have bad surprises which are not what didn't work so well um that kind of sets up your list for what needs to get cleaned up so what's your follow-up and fixing you know the idea of you know are you going to live in your house with six months with stuff still packed in boxes are you going to get after it you get everything put the way where it's supposed to go so this is kind of where you build a cleanup list of okay we had some bad records that that need to be addressed we had some staff that are struggling we need they need to get some training obviously you know the idea of those report comparisons again where maybe it's you know you dump the list of what was in the old one and the list of new one and compared those counts in by categories and things like that so you really want to be diligent about once the migration is complete you want to stay on stay on target have a partner plan to address the issues that need to be addressed take advantage of the new features you didn't have before and make sure you're getting every sense work out of the the new ILS you've gone to we talked a little bit about you know going in the ILS can definitely change the workflow that you have so again that's part of the follow-up so you know here's a feature that we think will save us a lot of time and effort that we do not have in the old ILS now's the time to sit down study it understand it and get it activated in use and take advantage of it which is one of the great you know one of the great capabilities of the new ILS the other thing to think about is you're on a very very old dinosaur ILS obviously technology has has moved quite a ways ahead from where it was at so are there new add-on products that you can take advantage of with this ILS that you couldn't do for you know the idea if you have public PCs in your library are you now able to have a software package on them that allows the patrons to use their bar code to log into a public PC and begin using it that you couldn't do with the old ILS because it didn't have that ability to interface with somebody else's system so you really want to kind of build the blueprint for here's the new features here's our new options we need to be diligent about taking advantage of them and be more efficient so that's the end of the slide show I had did anybody have any questions for me okay great sherm thank you that was actually really good if anybody does any questions nothing came in while you were talking I don't know about anybody else I was just kind of paying a lot close attention to how you guys did it and all the important parts to it I myself have not had to go through this process but I'm sure lots of other libraries have or are planning for it if anybody does have any questions type them into the question section of your go-to webinar interface or if you have a microphone just tell me you want to be unmuted and I can do that we can see if you could use your microphone to ask the question now I did no I'm not sure if everyone on the line here is aware of the the pioneer consortium that we have here in Nebraska can you explain give a little detail about what's involved in that and I know I believe we have a mixture of sizes of libraries and types of libraries in there now yeah we actually pretty it's pretty broad varied group of libraries across Nebraska what had happened is some of the libraries that founded the pioneer consortium we're all looking at new ils's we're actually I'm very put off by what the cost is going to be with the established vendors and I don't know how many of you are well aware of open-source software open-source software software that is technically it's free to use if you make any changes to it you need to be able to put those changes back into the community base that maintains that software package right koa is actually in the ils it was developed in New Zealand and they created a open-source version of koa there's a koa community and what they do is you can download their ils and load it on the server and write your library for free you don't have to pay them anything for the software the requirements with open sources if you do any programming changes to it to add features or do anything different with it you're required by using that to put those programming changes back to the community and then they will decide whether or not that's something they want to include in the community code base going forward the pioneer consortium chose to use a a vendor ptfs to who has a business of helping libraries get up and running on the koa ils except what you run into when you pick a vendor like that and there's several others that do it evergreen i think there's two or three major players in that and what they do is they will add features to the koa ils that their their customers want and then that what that does it kind of creates what we call a fork in the software world so you have the community version which does this and then evergreens added features to their version so it's a little bit different ptfs added features to their version so it's a little bit different so you kind of one up with these vendor specific forks of the base software and then again ptfs and evergreen and all those guys are required what they've developed and added on to koa has to be put back to the community so when you pick one of those vendors you're kind of on that vendor's version of an open source ils and you're paying them for their expertise and assistance and a lot of time they're the ones that are offering the software as a service too so they have ptfs has the data center that houses our databases and all our data and we connect them to the internet to run our ils and then by going with that open source model and being a little more self-reliant we've saved a lot of money compared to going with one of the leading ils vendors out there you know i more than we could see that is koa's feature is koa's feature rich is some of the top ils is out there no it's not but especially for a lot of the smaller libraries in our internet consortium with us in my library especially you know going with the top brand ils we would be paid for a lot of featureality that we would never need or never use so we chose to to go with a simpler ils where you know it has the features we need and if there is a feature that the consortium is strong feel strongly about we can actually pay ptfs's developers to add that feature to the ils for so not only do we get in at a low cost but we're really able to control the customization and the featureality we want added and made available within this ils so it's worked out very very well for us and and i think we're up to 24 libraries now in the consortium and they range in size from Lincoln cities grand island obviously our larger members you know down to our smaller vendors Stromsburg and some of the much smaller libraries and we've been able to assist the smaller libraries with a lot of stuff they wouldn't have had in the past or would have to pay the vendor a lot of money for that kind of assistance we've been able to offer that aid assistance as part of them being in the consortium. Great um yeah if anyone is interested in the show notes that we always have um after the show i have links for anything i've put a link to the pioneer website the WordPress site that you guys have so you can get more information from there and also to some memorial's own website uh and we do have one uh request can you put up the slide with your contact info again the first slide you had there while we're chatting here um and question now we do have some questions coming in while you're talking which is great uh how many other ils systems did you look at before you did decide to go with uh the koha um we we looked at you know the um biblionics you know pretty much the major players that were out there and the the price was just you know we were like kind of well there's just no way i mean even if we liked it there's just no way we can afford it and our director uh robin park has a good working relationship with steve also in a grand island and and uh pat and lincoln and they were you know really happy with what had gone on with the pioneer consortium so we chose to back that effort and join it and it's been wonderful for us not only did we get a good ils it was much better than the old fallout one we had um we we got in at a much lower cost that's been a big driver for us and all pretty much all the other libraries i worked on is it comes down to we just can't afford the catalac um can you find me a Chevy to drive around and it's worked it's worked great yeah these consortiums are always great i mean we've run lots of different groups for all sorts of different reasons here through the commission as well and can't beat the deals that you can get and like you're talking about the the uh other libraries that you can connect with and work with and and bounce ideas off of and figure out how you want to make something work and i know a lot of times in this pioneer group when a library's been interested um as you said you go and help them with the tech aspects and whatnot but also just being able to just talk to one of the other libraries and say so you guys went through this and you're small like us talk to me about it tell me you know how did it go and you're just getting idea ahead of time yeah so you basically have a whole built-in community that you have a question you know which is like where your neighbors you can ask us pretty much anything you need we can help out i do a lot of assistance with the reporting of the system the system doesn't have a lot of canned reports that you will see from the big ils's and that's that's okay because that's how pete's costs flow instead of paying for a bunch of fancy reports that we don't use and we're able to do a lot of customization and get exactly want using the sql reporting feature that's in ohaw and then i've been able to create standard reports that all the libraries are able to utilize and then if any of our library members have something you know a little little different they want or this report's good but it needs to have this and this you know i have no problem adding that in into the report going it's been a really a lot of fun cool speaking of reports we do have a question going back to the test data for report that you talked about earlier um does anyone know is that taking the results of a known report and comparing it to the results of the report on the new ils or how is that that's exactly what we're doing so um what a good example of a couple of reports so we would run our report of what was overdue and paulette and then that monday morning so we ran out on sunday night and then on monday morning when ptfs called us early monday morning said okay your date is all there you're ready to go we would run the the ptfs kohoh version of that report and then compare them get them right off the get go it's like okay do the counts match they do great then it looks like all of our um overdue migrated over just like it should we ran a report for patron fines again looking at the totals do they match up um we ran reports that gave us total counts of our collection that's how we then applied we had about um think about 500 records that for some reason didn't come over cleanly so then we got into it to see why these these 500 records didn't come across found a little deal we missed we didn't pick it up when we had done the same testing at the sandbox and then one of the ptfs migration experts was able to say oh i see what happened with these records and they were able to fix it for us you know with a little mass change on those records and get them all back in shape so having the reports to do that comparison is a very efficient way to measure the success of your data coming across all right um talking about tech technology expertise and i know you did you said you've helped a lot of libraries but just talking in general someone wants to know did you find that there was a need for in-house tech expertise or are you happy with vendor support only well what we ran into was a pretty mixed bag where we had libraries that had kept their their support up with their ils vendor so for example they were able to call their vendor and say we need help with the extraction because they kept their support up and they were paying for that kind of support their current ils vendor was able to walk the staff there at that library through the extraction process we had a lot of libraries though especially on the fall outside that hadn't been paying for support or upgrades for several years not only was there a version of the ils way way out of date they had no vendor assistance available to them to get their data out um one one of the things i did for the consortium was was do the research figure out um how to the how to get the information the extraction to work with like the version six of uh fall out that a lot of libraries that joined us were on and the current version was was nine and a half and they were pretty different so you know my expertise was made available um as part of the consortium and i had several libraries i went out on site and added the additional software that needed to be there so we could successfully extract their data so we're we're you know we're willing to help um and the fallout was a good example because that must have been the bargain ils at the time because we have a lot of our libraries and the consortium come off the old six and seven over to the fallout i remember it was very very popular it has been yeah we had we had a few libraries that worked on an old version of sage brush or an old version of winnebago and we did have a situation where the library had to contact the vendor and negotiated deal to pay for a month's support on this old version on this old version of an ils and the vendor said if you pay us for a month's support we will help you get your data out and what was funny is um like fallout we had a situation where somebody was on a really real old version of fallout and we got a different answer every time we called them was no we can't help you okay you pay us for a month's support we'll help you or okay you gotta pay for your support we'll help you it really turned it in it's like call that we got the answer you didn't want wait a couple days and call them again and maybe we'll get the answer we want it was really weird deal now what about with ptfs who the pioneer conversation is now how are they as far as like vendor and i know you talked about you've contacted them but overall they've been good too yeah ptfs has actually been around for a long long time they're a big big um software technology vendor to the to the federal government and i don't know if anybody's heard of live line ptfs actually had some government libraries that they took the koho community code for and got set up and then they were approached by live line the founders of live line were looking to get out of the the business and they bought live lines for instance of the koho code and then basically pkfs build then build business unit uses for libraries and they've been signing up a lot of libraries going they've got a significant deal now where they're one of their their key things has been the digitization and scanning business for government documents and archives and stuff and now they've got a big deal with a major government library where they're going to combine um koho with one of their major scanning digitization products to give this government entity not only in ils but integrate it with all the digitization products that they already are using with ptfs nice so there's some exciting stuff happening yeah someone here online also says that she's a longtime koho fan but my admins think open source has security issues what do you have to say about that i would say actually open source is the only way you're going to get a secure software package because the code is open for review um if you're you know followed anything in the news with the nsa at all it turns out a bunch of the technology vendors we're taking money from the nsa to give them back doors into the products that you were buying that were supposed to be secure i mean it's security companies that were taking nsa money to allow the nsa to get in and poke into their patrons their their customers systems by providing these secret back doors so when it's ice news you go in and look at your stuff the only way you could detect something like that is being able to actually look at the raw code and see that that kind of stuff is in there so right now when it comes to security um all bets are off because the nsa has actively um worked with a lot of the technology vendors to gain access to virtually any major product on the market so i mean we can talk to security talk but going forward um open source review will code is the only thing i think that you could have any faith in truly being uh secure because you're you know what you can see it yourself you don't just trust someone else necessarily no you can you know people on your staff that are programmers or you have a programmer you trust them they know the language that that product is written in they can review the code and say yeah this thing has backdoors in it or it did you know it was it has this or it has that if you can't see the raw code you will never know you have no idea really what what's in there yeah and that's what she says that's what i that's just what i thought it is more secure so hopefully this will help her get on get her admins on board um we do have a question i'm not sure what she mean i'm asked someone asked do you still run into problems i'm not sure problems with what maybe with just the like problems from the migration i know april if you can clarify which what you mean by which problems well while waiting for her to type that in she may have time um i have a different question someone did we'll get back to that one um how many records did you migrate and how many staff do you have at your library you want to see i think what size we're talking here 14 at something more library we migrated 54 000 um bibb records and 20 000 patron records over and and we're probably um kind of a medium-sized library as far as consortium is concerned there are smaller ones in the group yeah there's much smaller ones in the group and again um the attraction to them for the consortium was obviously the low cost but b then they gained the support of the other consortium library so they didn't have to be an expert or become an expert on it you know we're here to help and assist with anything they need i think a lot of it being able to have more control over your own system is just kind of a uh makes you feel better about just what it means like you said some of these libraries had such old file systems and i'm sure they knew um but it was just they couldn't afford to update or didn't have anyone on hand who could get them updated or knew what to do and they were you know struggling through and i think just getting being able to feel so much more confident in we know our system now we know what's good and we have people who can help us is also a plus for this too it's a feature that our staff just love was hold slips we were writing all our hold slips by hand just follow it didn't have an option for it and when you would call ball that they would say that they would add it to their enhancements list and then the other bad thing about dealing with fall head is they don't like public libraries they like school libraries ah so if you talk to them you were a public library you were already treated like a second class citizen a lot of libraries that there wasn't anything maybe available that libraries public libraries could afford and that's why a lot of them jumped to them whether fall it wanted them or not in the past let's say you know when we migrated to koal let's say it didn't have the ability to print a hold slip um we could have got together as consortium i'm guessing for a couple thousand dollars to pay ppf as programmer they would add a hold slip feature for us so that's kind of the beauty of the open source and and using a vendor to support it is that there's a feature we need and we want we don't have to have our own programmers on staff to create it we can go to them and they quote they'll spec out it will take us you know this this this much programming time this much testing time here's the date we could have it to you and here's the cost and we're able to uh solicit that information every year before we get ready to put our budget together and then we have a technical committee where we'll sit down and select kind of prioritize the new features everybody wants see what kind of money we have to spend and then we can say okay we're going to add these three features to the uh consortium this year it's it's a great setup you get exactly what you want you get it done exactly the way you want just the personalization of it just just yeah the personalization part of it is what i just love you know you go to them they do it and it's not you're waiting for this giant company to decide enough of their libraries who pay them want this feature so now we'll finally get around to doing something about it it's a much more one-on-one for you guys and then it's made available as the whole point of open source to any other groups who may have not you know have wanted the same feature as well they'll then be able to find that we actually have um two major consortiums click in colorado and um seos is wisconsin that we're now we formed a users group because they're both ptsc customers also and now we're actually combining our efforts on having features added to the ils so sls once the same feature we do we now share the cost to get it so we're even reducing our expenses even more and even benefit any more libraries so it just keeps getting better and better i can't say enough about it okay okay the problems was she's asked more is more actually day-to-day technical type things weeding problems or how to check out magazines apparently there's been some problems with just the you know day-to-day um specifically with what's been going on here that's more an issue with how your consortium is set up um what we discovered in pioneer is every library was doing periodicals differently nobody did things the same way um at at some we don't catalog our periodicals we use what we call the mag bag where you bring it over and we have these mylar bags that are barcoded and then we uh check you out the mag bag and then add a note to that item of what magazines or comic books or whatever aren't in it um other large libraries like linkin and that do a lot of magazine stuff what was nice is the system is versatile enough that everybody was kind of still able to do their periodicals the way they want but because everybody doesn't so different it's been very hard for us to kind of agree on a standard method consortium wide so that's more i would say an issue of being part of consortium and then what's a little different about pioneer consortium is we don't actually actively share our collections so we're all together in the same system but if you're if you want a book that's at Holdridge library and you're a member of my library you can't check out hold book i can go to an iol offline and get it for you but we don't do it within the consortium whereas scls and click or what i would call true consortiums they run they're about libraries are all run as one giant library with a bunch of branches so if you check out your um click in your library you check out an item that's at another library they actually handle all that internally as part of their consortium right it's a different situation yeah that would be somewhere where we would love to get to at some point with the idea that we had a statewide consortium and we could share our resources down to the collection and item levels right because this is the pioneer consortium but it's just an automation consortium just for the software not it some people think of as a consortium as we all share our books and items and resources among between each other yeah it's a different at this point it's at a different level yeah we're consortium and in iol s operations and cost and that kind of is where we put on the line at this right yeah um last couple of questions here related to related questions what is the one thing that you did during the migration that you would tell people not to do um we took a lot of time to plan ahead so our migration i was we were all very satisfied with how our migration went um like word of warning with something that didn't work i guess i would use for some of the example libraries some of our small libraries we had a real issue where they just they didn't they didn't practice or train at all you know we we helped them get their data out we helped them clean their data up a little bit they migrated and then they're like you know calling us it's like you know how do i put a book on hold you know and they had plenty of time to test ahead of that but that's you know my experience with other libraries is is train train train train as much training as you can do ahead of time get your staff at speed get them comfortable it's total payoff right there's none of that as a waste and that may be whether the other half of this question that this group asks is what we would say is the one thing you should not skip in the process this in what step yeah that kind of related to it yeah don't skip out on that training don't think you can just kind of go on the fly and figure it out yeah because of the sandbox environment that ppfs provides to our consortium where you literally have all your data in a you know sandbox a playground environment before you ever go live there is no reason that your staff should not be fully trained and fully up the speed on how everything's going to work before you go live i mean it's there's just no excuse you literally have a working system that you could be training on and practicing on you know before before it really counts and you're actually live running the library on it that's nice you don't just be dumped into a blind yeah it's not one of those things where here's kind of a demo system where you can kind of fool around i mean this is exactly what you're going to have when you go live it's just invaluable so then once we're live if we want to like make parameter changes and see how it works and what it's going to impact we have the sandbox available for that so if we want to as consortium we want to change some rules we can actually go to the sandbox change some of our operating parameters within the software and then we can actually check some books in and out and constant finds and things that we can actually see what's going to happen so where there's no unintended consequences nice you know exactly how this is going to work if we change the rule on this line or that line or when something becomes lost we can try that all out ahead of time one final question that you're the same person that's one of the issues can you try before you buy i think she's meaning if she wants to be if they want to be part of the pioneer consortium can they see you know get maybe a test or check you know some sort of demo or something before deciding yeah you better i've gone out uh steve lossman has our membership committee has gone out and demoed the product for libraries were interested in joining we've granted them access into the sandbox so they could actually get into the sandbox give them a login and they could go in and play around in the sandbox and try stuff out again that that sandbox environment it's just an absolute must-have for what you're able to test train demo it's great i can't say enough about it and that's nice that's it and that's different because you can actually get the behind the scenes staff at version as well i mean you can go to all these libraries web pages and see their catalog of the system which is nice but as far as working with it yourself as an actual employee that's the other side that you can't see without having that kind of behind the scenes access yeah so good examples you want to delete a book and see what happens in the catalog we can't do it on my life system no going go in the sandbox delete a book that's got a hold on it or it's checked out see what happens go to town yeah try to break it yeah great okay that was our last question um anybody else have your last urgent questions of course you can contact shirm at his uh you got the phone number and email up there or contact the library like i said i've got the links to the consortium in the will be available um when the recording is put out as well um i also had a link to some own memorial libraries on page and the two consortiums you guys are part of or working with click and the scls in wisconsin click in colorado so people want to know see what they're all about um doesn't look like anything urges come in we're a little after 11 o'clock which is fine because we did start really late so i think we will wrap it up for this morning thank you so much for coming on today shirm and telling us about this oh thanks for having me i i love talking about this yeah i know i've seen that i know there's been many presentations around the state here at conferences and meetings that have had on here in the show about the consortium itself and joining and what that entails but i think this is the first time we've heard someone really talk about the nitty-gritty and the step-by-step what it takes to really do the migration in in much more detail that's kind of how i set this out there it's kind of how i set this presentation up it's not so much to sell our pioneer consortium but you know even if you chose to go with another product um we learned some good lessons through our process and you know we can save somebody some pain we'd love to be able to do that yeah exactly all these steps will work for any migration no matter which you're going to absolutely all right well thank you very much then i'm going to pull back presenter control here to myself to switch to my screen there we go and there is the yeah that's the pioneer web page that was just saving there um pop over here there we go so thank you very much shirm thank you much everyone for attending i hope it was useful to you the session is being recorded and will be available later today on the website here down in our archived encompass live sessions section here we have the archives of all of our previous shows that you can watch you can see the videos if there's a powerpoint presentation any links that were related to the show i hope so that we're up for this morning i hope you join us next week when our topic is password management and security not necessarily a fun topic but an important topic for everyone libraries patrons everyone included jasmine dean who is the director in chubbock idaho of the porten of district library will be online with us talk about how to create and keep um your passwords secure at libraries we have passwords for everything just like people do at home and as well and so she's going to give a great presentation next week for that so sign up for that join us there next week if you are a facebook user please do like us on facebook we do have a web page for the show um if you do that you'll get notifications of um when new new shows have started uh when our recordings are available anything we'll have here on our website so if you are a big facebook user go ahead please do like us there other than that that will wrap us wrap it up for this morning thank you very much for attending and we'll see you next week on encompass live bye