Migrating to Alma Without an Acquisitions Staff: Evolving Acquisitions and Electronic Workflows From Their Legacy Silos

Abstract

When the decision was made to migrate to Alma integrated library system, Rowan University libraries had an acquisitions department and a moderate understanding of how this migration would occur. With the official announcement of the migration to Alma, the entire acquisitions team announced their retirement shortly thereafter. While Alma provided the library with an opportunity to reevaluate workflows and collaborations this was a curveball that no one was expecting. Additionally, many resources were not traditionally tracked in Voyager, the previous library management system but tracked in Intota the previous electronic resource management system. However, these resources would now be tracked in Alma for a variety of reasons. This added another layer of complication to the retirements that occurred and the implementation that was well underway. This paper will discuss how Rowan University Libraries has managed the Alma migration without the historical institutional memory of the former acquisitions team. It will also examine how the libraries have examined workflows anew as a result of both the migration and these vacancies, and how Rowan University Library has taken advantage of these expanding opportunities since the beginning of the migration until and through the go-live date to account for these new integrations.