ELUNA 2015

For almost a decade the State University of New York (SUNY) has supported a shared server environment that contains the Aleph regions of 57 campuses.  (There are also four SUNY University research institutions that maintain their own installations of Aleph.)   While the Aleph regions of the 57 campuses are on shared servers, they do not share data as each campus has a separate suite of Aleph libraries (01, 10. 30, 50, 60).  This design was based on campus expectations that while they would be part of shared server operations, they would maintain local control of their library data.  Over the years campuses have suffered staffing decreases and there has been a significant shift from print to electronic resources.  These factors contributed to a decision to investigate the feasibility of consolidating the individual campus catalogs to one shared catalog/shared bibliographic record environment.  During the summer and fall 2014 SUNY worked on phase 1 of what we named the “One Bib POC” (proof of concept) to load and merge data associated with 12 campuses.  While there is still testing underway and more functionality that has not yet been addressed, there has been success on the activities that have been completed.  Starting in January 2015 SUNY will move forward with the 2^nd phase of the One Bib POC to merge data from all 57 campuses.  Come join us as we share the challenges of this process, what we are learning, and impacts this will have if we move forward with this project to production.

Aleph