Hi all,
We are a consortium with some libraries that used Acquisitions in our old system. (They are all public libraries, not academic.) When we migrated to Evergreen, Acquisitions had moved from being a preview to being a flawed, though functional part of the system. However, some of our acq libraries dropped using it because it was slow and clunky workflow. However, since we've upgraded to Evergreen 2.2, we've seen a lot of improvements in Acquisitions. Most of our libraries use Title Source and upload their orders to Evergreen in a MARC file. In the past, our aggravation was that staff had to manually link each lineitem to the catalog, or risk creating duplicate records in the catalog. Since the upgrade, the uploading process works with the Vandelay loader to automatically match existing bib records and associate the lineitems with those bibs. Since this improvement, a couple of member libraries have contacted me to get them started in using Acquisitions. We are looking forward to further improvements, especially in the area of invoicing. For more detail about how we use Acquisitions, I'm happy to share the documentation that I wrote for our libraries. http://biblio.org/dbs/Acq%20Table%20of%20Contents.htm Mary Mary Llewellyn Database Manager Bibliomation, Inc. Middlebury, CT [email protected] From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Tara Robertson Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2012 12:42 PM To: Evergreen Discussion Group Subject: Re: [OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] acquisitions redux Hi, This is my perspective in using ACQ since January, mainly through managing tech services in small academic library. I would not recommend using ACQ at this point. For me performance is the main issue. ACQ is dreadfully slow. We are in a urban centre, with a good ISP, nearby the data centre for our consortium and things were still brutally slow. The Sitka support folks have a workaround accessing some of ACQ through a web browser, which improves things quite a bit. Instead of being very, very, very slow, they are just slow. This was not a deal breaker for us, as we have a very small acquisitions budget (~$40k/year). However most of my staff using ACQ were quite frustrated and cranky. If I had known how poor the performance was I would've waited until the next fiscal year to use start acquisitions. I wouldn't recommend using ACQ at this point. I see the potential for ACQ to be awesome in the future (it's very flexible and will support so many types of workflows), but right now it isn't. I've been wary to share my frustrations with ACQ on this list because I know that there are people who are considering migrating to Evergreen and that there are likely proprietary ILS vendor reps on this list who are looking for more fodder to scare their customers away from using Evergreen. As the software and our community mature we need to foster a culture where we can communicate frankly and help build the software and community that we want. In that vein, I'm extremely grateful to the folks who've been working behind the scenes to flesh out development priorities, functional requirements, get some cash together to pay for development and to the developers who seem to be listening: http://blog.esilibrary.com/2012/07/11/high-speed-2-3-acq-development/ Sitka has excellent documentation for ACQ, but I'm not sure if they are sharing it beyond their consortium. Perhaps someone from Sitka could share the link? Hope this is useful, Tara On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 7:23 AM, J. Sara Paulk <[email protected]> wrote: Appreciate responses and realize that there is some basic documentation out there. Let me take a different approach. Those of you who are using Acquisitions. What decisions did you make when you started that you totally regret or conversely are thrilled with? What do you wish with all your heart that you had done prior to start using the module? What do you wish you had known that you know now? Who do you wish you had involved that you didn't? What steps is the Evergreen documentation missing or what assumptions does it make that it shouldn't? Any other general words of wisdom for one who may be going into the fray are and will be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance. Respectfully, J. Sara Paulk Regional Director Wythe-Grayson Regional Library P.O. Box 159, Independence, VA 24348 Phone-276-773-3018 / FAX 276-773-3289 http://wythegrayson.lib.va.us Email [email protected]
