Alma project update – June

The Alma project team is pleased to share their latest update:

While the world is busy watching international football teams competing in the world cup, somewhere in UCL our own Alma midfielders have been playing ball in a game of testing and configuration.

And just like in a top league game, after the official kick off, there may be sweat, challenges and a long second half before we can hit our goal.

Over May and June, the project team conducted a series of drop in sessions to give staff the opportunity to get an overview of the project and schedule for the remaining months as well as raising any questions they may have.

We would like to thank everyone who came to meet us. We have collated the questions in an FAQ document which we will be sharing through LibNet very soon.

To make this transition as smooth as possible for everyone we are currently engaging with managers to plan the training on Alma across all sites and to communicate about the support channels available. You will receive separate communications via emails about the training plan and schedule within your team.

Keep calm and carry on

Undoubtedly replacing Aleph for Alma is one of the biggest changes that Library Services will go through in a long time and it will bring challenges.

Some things to keep in mind:

• The system will not be perfect from go live: we could still discover bugs after go live and fixes will need to be developed
• Being trained on the new system and using the system on a daily basis are two different things. The pupil will soon become the master!
• We all learn at a different pace; mutual assistance, knowledge sharing and patience are key.

Well spotted!

We have asked our colleagues to share their favourite thing about Alma:

“Because Alma is cloud based (online) you can make the page and font bigger or smaller”

“We used to complete one of our tasks in Aleph going through 15 steps, in Alma the same task can now be completed in just 10 steps!”

“I can use multiple browser tabs to keep multiple Alma pages open at the same time.  In Aleph you had to exit a page each time before switching to a new one”