Welcome to the "Hot off the Press" blog series from guest blogger, Teresa Kalber. Teresa is the Network Systems Administrator at Colorado Talking Book Library. In this series, she will be sharing her library's experience being one of the first two KLAS libraries to implement NLS' Gutenberg equipment.

Hot off the Press: Part 1

A little delayed, but as promised we are sharing our experience of converting over to Gutenberg duplication as our main circulation method. This first installment will cover our pre-planning steps.

Our Director has been excited about using duplication on demand since she first heard about it. Knowing this and also knowing our KLAS server was reaching end of life and would not support KLAS 7.7, I began conversations with both our IT department and Keystone as early as December 2018 with a plan to have our server replaced by June 2019. I also started discussions with our security officer and our network administrator about DoD to ensure we would be able to use the equipment on our network without issues.

In May 2019, we found out we had been chosen to be the self-hosted pilot site for Gutenberg integration with KLAS. Our IT department had set-up a new virtual server for me and agreed to allow Keystone to submit an image to be placed on the server to run KLAS. Their caveat was that they would not provide support since the software didn’t conform to standards. Since they have never provided support for our servers anyway, I didn’t see this as a problem.

Things we needed to think about between finding out about the pilot and getting the Gutenberg equipment in September:

• Placing an order for additional mail cards beyond what NLS provides
• Preparing cartridges and containers to use for DoD
  • Placing labels on unused cartridges and containers
  • Stripping labels from used cartridges and containers and replacing with new labels
• Notification of patrons – we did a blurb in our newsletter and that was our only notification to patrons.
• Selecting patrons for the pilot (if you do one)
• When to start new patrons on DoD (we started new patrons when we started the pilot)
• When to zero out copy allotment so no new books come
• How to cut-over patrons once the pilot is complete
• Initial default number of books on a cartridge and default number of cartridges (We used 10 books/3 cartridges per patron as our default)

Both NLS and Keystone have documents of things to consider during planning stages. NLS also has a great overview of the necessary IT requirements. Once I received this document, I forwarded it to our Security Officer and Network Administrator to ensure there would be no problems in using the Gutenberg equipment on our network. I think opening these lines of communication early helped the process go more smoothly.

We were finally able to convert to KLAS 7.7 on August 19, 2019. This gave us about a month to iron out any issues before receiving our equipment from NLS on September 20th.