Cori Wilhelm: Okay, we are ready to go, Shannon.
Shannon Pritting: All right, all right.
Shannon Pritting: I did not intend this, but the you know, the the
Shannon Pritting: past current and future is like You know the genre of holiday movies of you know, the the
Shannon Pritting: bringing, you know the Christmas Carol forward. But any. So. I just wanted to go through
Shannon Pritting: where we've been and try to bring, you know. Try to bring things forward and explain the situation, because there's been a lot of
Shannon Pritting: individual conversations and individual engagements, and you know our attempt will be just to level set as much as possible.
Shannon Pritting: So where extended support really began is that we tried a very complex migration while also trying to implement the Slc and
Shannon Pritting: you know we we developed short-term solutions, and then tried to react to what the needs were for. you know.
Shannon Pritting: host migration, and some of that, had we, we predicted correctly and some of it. We need to adjust I think so. Just looking at the migration from Alma to Primo, from 2,017 to or 2018 to 2019 roughly.
Shannon Pritting: This is really where all this
Shannon Pritting: took a lot of it's it's funding, and moved it to project staff, and then covered the all of the ex-librous implementation and migration costs, which was, I think, a
Shannon Pritting: roughly 1.2,000,001 point, 2, 5 million something like that in directly to ex-librous to move us from
Shannon Pritting: from Alice and Eds slash summon to almah and primo and then also some of the oldest technical staff provided additional support on top of the 3 fte that we had related to migration, and
Shannon Pritting: I was going back some of my old emails that I archive from 2,018. And there was this a lot going on where campuses were like. I cannot do any of this now or in the future, and we tried to respond to that as much as possible, and I think a lot of campuses have found that they can do it.
Shannon Pritting: and Don't necessarily need as much help. So that's what we're trying to do is reset what we need to do. 2 years after the migration 2 and a half years after the migration.
Shannon Pritting: but we built up a lot in relation to this and we knew during that 2 years of the migration the campuses need needed and wanted and appreciated a lot of support. next slide, Corey.
Shannon Pritting: and I think that the program that was probably most representative of this was the guided path that about. I think it was about 50 campuses took advantage of the or, you know, took us up on the offer for the guided path.
Shannon Pritting: which was rather than local campus doing any of the you know, any of the configuration work or any of the migration form work themselves. They wanted us to do that. We did it, you know, and in some ways it was more efficient.
Shannon Pritting: I could spend an entire weekend doing migration forms versus someone trying to learn how to do a migration form. and then our hope was that campuses would spend that time
Shannon Pritting: on the training that exhibits, and we were providing
Shannon Pritting: and you know we were basing a lot of our needs on what campuses we're saying to us. related to the migration
Shannon Pritting: and trying to build up a a reasonable shared service. That, was only enough staff to meet the needs at the lowest cost that we could possibly do at 4 campuses next slide.
Shannon Pritting: and I I resurrected these you know these infographics that we put together and Nano man. There was a lot of confusion, and also went back to my emails of like
Shannon Pritting: people complaining about. I'm confused about 6, plus 2 or 3, plus one or 4 plus 2, plus, you know. We tried to negotiate and tried to bring a shared service forward that met the needs of campuses who wanted to
Shannon Pritting: have most of their library technology covered, or a blend, and then also to try to take advantage of as much of possible a of of a shared system that I think
Shannon Pritting: almond primo have been
Shannon Pritting: I
Shannon Pritting: good shared system, but you know, maybe we you know, maybe we're not taking advantage of as much of it as we could. We based a lot of our planning on the Cal State system and the Cal State system
Shannon Pritting: as as much as we've said this. you know we need to keep saying it. They're much different than we are.
Shannon Pritting: So Slc was not able to come to consensus on how to move forward. Lot of discussions about this you know, Carrie and mark we, you know, did a fantastic job of finding a partner to grow
Shannon Pritting: services outside of system administration. You know there's some internal policies that make it very hard and costly to build shared services with system employees. So we needed to find a a campus partner, and luckily Empire State College stepped up.
Shannon Pritting: and we were able to grow a shared service by hosting positions at Empire State College.
Shannon Pritting: and we also got a second
Shannon Pritting: very, very positive thing. is that
Shannon Pritting: you know we negotiated a pretty good contract. I talked to other consortia, and they're surprised at what our contract terms are with almond primo. I think we just got lucky because we dragged our feet long enough where we
Shannon Pritting: we had some leverage in ex leavers needed to get a big win at the end of their fiscal year
Shannon Pritting: and that that that that served us very well in that not only
Shannon Pritting: where campus is not asked to pay more for almond primo, which was another big fear is, I don't want to pay more for a premium system. I want a baseline system and we saved well over 200,000, 235,000, and kept costs
Shannon Pritting: at the same as what campuses we're paying with aleph and eds
Shannon Pritting: All right. So that's how sls began. And then we work to
Shannon Pritting: try to pull together services that went beyond baseline support, so that we would help with training. We would help with, you know, when issues arise that were there were higher level for the roughly 1516 campuses that repeatedly said to us.
Shannon Pritting: I don't have the staff.
Shannon Pritting: we can't do this.
Shannon Pritting: we need help. And then we also, I think
Shannon Pritting: you know we tried to whether the post migration request for support by, you know, trying to encourage campuses to to to to build some some local expertise.
Shannon Pritting: We had, you know, limits on 5 baseline hours. A lot of discussion about that and then, once the pandemic hit, we just shifted gears to say, let's try to be as helpful as we can without limits. We'll have one on one conversations if someone is
Shannon Pritting: really taking advantage of the situation, and and frankly, that's really only happened a couple of times, and
Shannon Pritting: we did less and less. You know we were doing hundreds and hundreds of of of training sessions. We did. We had curriculum maps to try to bring everybody up to speed.
Shannon Pritting: and then we just started focusing on one on one support. that was campus focused next slide.
Shannon Pritting: So some of the early extended support engagements.
Shannon Pritting: we couldn't get
Shannon Pritting: many that were more than single year agreements, and then we would have to negotiate
Shannon Pritting: 4 or 5 levels of of you know agreements of of of of
Shannon Pritting: interactions at campuses for sometimes a couple of $1,000 really really high administrative overhead like this was 30% of my job for a solid year is just
Shannon Pritting: talking to campus administration about this, and it was mostly focused on hourly services.
Shannon Pritting: We did training. We did work for campuses. We did a whole lot of organizational consulting
Shannon Pritting: and you know, I think that all of the campuses, except for a few so this is transitionary and not long-term solutions, and i'm not
Shannon Pritting: i'm not questioning that decision.
Shannon Pritting: and I also spent
Shannon Pritting: much of my time meeting with a variety of campuses who
Shannon Pritting: had no interest in a support engagement with us, except for for us to get them to provide a document that they could bring into labor management discussions.
Shannon Pritting: It always led to really, really problematic issues where people didn't want us to be involved except for
Shannon Pritting: to push the situation to a different scenario, and
Shannon Pritting: it just. We were honest to ourselves in the last year, and said, that is never productive.
Shannon Pritting: We want to be helpful to support the people there, and say, No, we are not going to do extended support. But what do you need from us? Because you don't have enough staff
Shannon Pritting: things like that? so we tried to have fewer arrangements, or just, you know, discussions about how to avoid extended support and bring extended support into.
Shannon Pritting: you know. Use to say like. I want to justify a staff by you being more expensive things like that. I get it like I get. Why, people were doing it, but it just wasn't productive.
Shannon Pritting: go ahead, Corey.
Shannon Pritting: So some of the adjustments we started making in the last year is, we significantly lowered costs to try to meet the needs of campuses, who library, administration, library, leaderships, library, staff saw extended support as a positive as a supplement, as something that
Shannon Pritting: you know they want it to have happen, and their administration wanted to have happen. and you know, in campuses who are reaching out to us to say, we want you to be involved to amplify how you know how how problematic the situation is. we just said, what can we do to help?
Shannon Pritting: Let's take extended support out of the scenario. Consider that as part of baseline support and navigate as much as possible
Shannon Pritting: the next 2 years about what's happening at some of the campuses that are, you know, in crisis.
Shannon Pritting: So in in coordination with a couple of community colleges who gave us really good input we created a a low cost, small campus resource, management and systems agreement a lot of the community colleges. We're seeing their catalogers retire.
Shannon Pritting: and they just weren't getting much traction, and it was stressing out the directors because they're like. I've got to figure out how to catalog, and we're like we're not really sure that's you know a good long term solution for your own health, and your own retention. So we try to, you know, offer solutions as much as possible.
Shannon Pritting: and then also some campuses asking us for a longer range system support. We tried to lower that cost as much as possible, while also admitting to some campuses, it's clear You want to develop your own staff. How can we transition to something where you You know you develop your own staff, and we supplement you
Shannon Pritting: all right next slide. So right now we have 17 agreements. of varying natures. They're spread across the different sectors for comprehensive work with us in very different ways. 8 community colleges work with us in very different ways.
Shannon Pritting: The 2 university centers, I think we just supplement them in very, very specific ways, and mostly related to the
Shannon Pritting: you know, resource, sharing, and resource management. And you know, I think that's part of what we're what we're seeing, too, is we. We we exist in an ecosystem where there are other partners like the Ids project that have also lost staff
Shannon Pritting: lost capacity. And we're, you know, trying to supplement as much as possible in those areas.
Shannon Pritting: And then we also have small doctorals. working with us, too.
All right, Corey.
Shannon Pritting: So we've also tried to do more with without agreements again, you know, trying to react to the situations that we're seeing
Shannon Pritting: pretty much to say. How can we be helpful, taking the 3 staff that everybody is, is contributing to.
Shannon Pritting: Then what we've been able to grow with some additional extended support agreements
Shannon Pritting: doing, auditing, doing onboarding, trying to get more out of this shared system with supporting integrations doing more with analytics directly for campuses. working with campuses on. You know how to plan and implement projects.
Shannon Pritting: and then One of the things that we tried to lean into as much as possible is understand what campus is needed with repositories and help find more automated and batch processing ways to do that. and then trying to be a helpful partner
Shannon Pritting: and not, you know. A third party brought in to kind of you know, use in in negotiations with, you know, organizational changes. We we tried to be helpful as much as we could. So that's where we're at where we're at right now with You know these outside of agreements.
Shannon Pritting: So some of the major areas we're seeing lots and lots of requests for cataloging, lots of requests for High-end Iliad work because you know, but that is just does not have enough staffing, and there are really really complicated iterations of.
Shannon Pritting: I low workflows out there that we're trying to help people piece through.
Shannon Pritting: We do more and more procurement. That, I think, is ballooning out we're helping people with lib guides. We're helping with analytics. We help them with scholarly communications, consulting
Shannon Pritting: general troubleshooting including easy proxy, including their campus systems. we do accessibility consulting, and then we also help campuses to figure out how they would approach different problems and issues at their campus. So
Shannon Pritting: you know, if if there's anything I really want people to understand from this is.
Shannon Pritting: we've tried to be helpful outside of Alma in Primo, and I know that campuses see us sls Olis as
Shannon Pritting: well. What do you do? Besides all mutt and primo, and we're trying to you, and we're trying to explain this in this general 2 h. But I think this is something that we're doing more in the entire library technology ecosystem. And I think if you included the collection development work that we're doing with and for, and you know.
Shannon Pritting: in in cooperation with campuses, you know, that could be another major area and an additional slide
Shannon Pritting: next slide, Corey.
Shannon Pritting: So if you know, this is the this is the ghost of the future. Right? So,
Shannon Pritting: I want to make this the most positive one. Where there's a where there's a a a positive outcome. Right is
Shannon Pritting: focusing on supplemental services. and only in very targeted areas where campuses are. You know
Shannon Pritting: everybody's on board at as many levels as you can get on board. Would we come in and do work for campuses? trying to help retain and build local staff, so that if you hire someone you're not, you know.
Shannon Pritting: you know you have someone to help support them in training, and then also maybe relieve them of some of the duties that might be really challenging. If you're at a small community college
Shannon Pritting: and then, if a campus is in crisis because of everything that's going on, we'll provide targeted assistance in cooperation with Who's there?
Shannon Pritting: And then, if you're looking for help with a larger image. Initiative will help you to frame that. and then, you know, if there are small campuses or small groups of partners who want to work together. We're always willing to have those conversations
Shannon Pritting: and then try to keep Alma and Primo has stabilized and efficient layer things on as they make sense. and then, you know where we see opportunities arise where campuses are saying to us.
Shannon Pritting: you know, in a perfect world I would have a cataloger at my community college. But this isn't a perfect world. We would really like to have you do that work centrally. And how do we do that inefficient way, or we're partners where we say to them like, we have limitations to.
Shannon Pritting: How do we work together? but be very mindful about those areas where we're really growing
Shannon Pritting: all right. Questions, comments
Cori Wilhelm: I'm going to stop this portion of the recording.
Cori Wilhelm: Oh, I stopped the share instead
alright.