Final technical observations

For those interested in a quick summary of the technical aspects of this project, the implementation notes which form part of the 'one minute blog' post may prove useful.

Here I thought I'd concentrate on a couple of technical areas that have eaten away at the time.

Shibboleth implementation is one of the main culprits in this category. Although this formed part of the contract with our supplier, there were still significant obligations, both for library systems staff as well as IT Services staff. The university already had a Shibboleth idp service in place but on the library side we started from scratch and encountered a fairly steep learning curve. There's a whole new vocabulary to learn when addressing issues that surround authentication - it's wasn't immediately obvious where to go for help. Fairly early on our PM, sporting a large grin, pronounced, "I don't do Shibboleth!" I can see why. Added to this, the upgrade to the unversity's idp from Shibboleth version 1.3 to version 2.0, right in the middle of our testing phase, set us back considerably.

Following on from the Shibboleth issue, we were also aware we needed to upgrade the OPAC authentication functionality which still made use of our 14 digit patron barcodes. In order to move to Shibboleth authentication, it would prove necessary to insert patron usernames into their Aleph records. Inserting this data into the relevant field (z308_rec_key) with the appropriate flag would prove time-consuming. Occasionally the unversity issues a new username to a user - dealing with updates of this type continues to create some problems.

Other time-consuming activities included establishing data export / import routines for the source systems. The library management system Aleph proved troublesome - plenty of room for improvement in the supplier's documentation here. Having said that, the work our PM carried out on the university's repository product, Equella, proved invaluable.

Finally I'm sure my colleague who worked through many of our technical troubles (and is currently taking a well-earned holiday) would want me to mention the unavoidable overhead that is incurred when installing separate third party products which all go to form part of the complete installation.

By definition any summary such as this will struggle to give a complete picture; I hope these observations have at least provided a useful snapshot.