2018 Annual Meeting

General/ Strategic--Not Product Specific
Alma
Primo/MetaLib

In early 2017, Northeastern University Libraries began a project to significantly reduce the print and microform collection footprint in the main research library, Snell Library, by the beginning of 2018. Less frequently used volumes were moved to an offsite annex managed by William B. Meyer where they are requestable through Primo. In addition to project management challenges expected for a move of this size we also faced Alma and Primo related issues.

Since items in the annex are requestable to users through Primo, we partnered with Meyer and Ex Libris to establish Alma NCIP integration. Our NCIP integration with Meyer was the first of its kind. We also tested and implemented the Remote Storage functionality in Alma.  

The criteria used to move the collection to the annex had to be data-driven and therefore relied on Alma Analytics reporting to help guide what should be moved to the annex. We used migrated loan data from our previous ILS as well as in-house and regular loan data from Alma to guide the decision - Analytics reporting was also used to generate the pick lists used by Meyer.

This project spanned almost every department in the library. Our lessons learned will be valuable as more Ex Libris libraries move large print collections off site, but want to continue to make them available to their communities.

General