The Go Live date for the SCLS migration to Koha is postponed until the end of 2010.
As many of you are aware, PTFS recently acquired LibLime—the vendor that is supporting our Koha ILS. Patrick Jones of LibLime/PTFS met with SCLS staff last week and provided an update on the status of the SCLS development project. The good news is that there are around 50 out of our 110 active development features that are in some stage of completed development. The not-so-good news is that all of the rest have little or no work done on them at all. It is pretty certain that the core functionality determined by member libraries would not be completed in time for our projected Go Live date of September 7, 2010.
Given the two options of going live with less than our full slate of core development projects or postponing the migration to the end of 2010, SCLS has decided, based on feedback received from member libraries both at a meeting with libraries and Patrick on May 13th and throughout the migration process, that it is important to have the system functioning as we need it on Go Live.
There are other benefits to delaying the migration. The summer training program was proving problematic due to staff vacations and summer reading program. Postponing to the end of year means that the cataloging and acquisitions cutoff will be at a time when this activity declines naturally. There will be one year-end process (on Dynix only) which means that libraries will have just one set of reports to work with for the state annual report. Acquisitions libraries will be able to begin on a new fiscal year, instead of in the middle of a year in progress. Migrating over one of the December holidays will mean that more libraries are closed for more days than if we migrated over the Labor Day holiday.
Given that the end of the year seems a more ideal time to migrate, you may wonder why we picked Labor Day to begin with. The reason was that we expected that we would need to be off of our Dynix Classic system by the end of November, 2010. However, when the 2010 budget was set, it was decided to extend the Dynix maintenance agreement to the end of February, 2011. The end of the year migration still gives us breathing room between the migration and the end of the Dynix maintenance agreement. We have not selected an actual migration date, but here is a rough timeline based on the postponement:
- May-July: Migration committees continue development testing, data migration testing and setup
- August: Staff Koha “sandbox” with SCLS library data made available for training
- August-September: Provide webinars and online tutorials to introduce staff to Koha
- October-November: SCLS staff conduct regional hands on train-the-trainer workshops
- October-December: In-library training (done by library trainers)
- Late November/Early December: Acquisitions and cataloging cutoff
- December: SCLS staff conduct online refresher workshops
- End of December: Migration
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