Rationale For Migration

Timing is everything:  no time is a good time to replace a great search tool.  Why did CAPT make the decision to replace the ORR functionality now—this is very confusing to users and to staff. What are the benefits?  Why are we doing this now?

  1. ORR is locally-developed technology that is now obsolete and fragile—when we make changes in unrelated places it sometimes causes the ORR to go down.  We cannot support a production system that is unreliable.
  2. There are new commercial technologies that perform the same and more effective functions;
  3. The developers of the ORR have left the Library—there is no one on staff who was involved in the development or the maintenance;
  4. There are staff vacancies in CAM and Library IT that once supported the ORR;
  5. The ORR support is living on “borrowed time”—CAM and Library IT staff who work on the ORR cannot devote time to implementing the new e-resource search and discovery technologies.

What is taking the place of the ORR, and why is this taking so much time?

  1. The Library has licensed the SFX A-Z e-journal software that has advanced functionality;
  2. The Library has the EasySearch functionality that has enhanced the way users find information from the ORR, the catalog, databases, and ebooks.
  3. The Library is poised to license a Web-scale search and discovery system that will give us advanced functionality to find these types of resources;
  4. We started the upgrade this summer because the ORR is too fragile for the Library to sustain as a production system for one more academic year;
  5. Librarians and IT professionals in several units have added this responsibility to their already full plates to migrate us to a point where we are functioning with stable production systems;
  6. We intend to replace most of the ORR functionality during the Fall sem
  7. For examples of ORR equivalent functions in SFX and other library resources, see the Online Research Resources (ORR) and SFX Comparison.

What are we doing, and what will it look like to Library staff and users?

  1. The Library is migrating off the ORR system, and replacing it with a combination of functions using current and new production systems like SFX A-Z ejournal list, the Easy Search search engine, and the VuFind and Voyager Classic catalogs.  Our approach is to make it easy to find materials in more ways than one.:

What if the ORR goes down before we have all the new functionality?

  1. We will try to resuscitate the ORR.  If we have trouble, we will need your help in identifying what functions are critical to you so we can prioritize our work to meet your priorities.

How do I find out what is happening?

  1. http://www.library.illinois.edu/it/helpdesk/orrupgrade/index.html

A-Z List functionality:

<coming soon>

Ebooks, reference resources:

  1. We have devoted more resources to getting bibliographic records for ebooks into the online catalogs; loading thousands per month with close to 600,000 ebook records in the online catalogs currently.
  2. Strategies for searching ebooks in Easy Search and the online catalogs
  3. Adding bibliographic records in the online catalogs for reference resources; goal is to get a bibliographic record into the online catalog for eresources
  4. Future possibilities with web-scale discovery services (indexing and FRBRising search results to show all formats of title/work)

A&I databases:

<coming soon>