Everything changes but you
Seldom have I felt so much satisfaction from hearing customers say "nothing has changed" after we released Talis Source to a number of sites, prior to the go live date on Friday 19th May.
This was the litmus test for the work we needed to do to transition UnityWeb to Talis Source. We knew that many customers were just not in a position to transition to an entirely new system, with an entirely new look and feel in such a short space of time. And nor were they all able to accommodate the necessary retraining costs, which in reality boiled down to staff time away from the desk handling requests.
So, we were pretty pleased when we started getting comments back like these from our early release sites:
"...its the same and that's wonderful. Basically, thank goodness that it's there....I can't see any significant change, which is ideal for my staff who just want to carry on tomorrow as they did yesterday. We'll be continuing to use it!"
Carol Marshall, Hampshire
"Well, it's exactly the same, much to my relief, which means that staff can pick it up straight away"
Sheila Houldin, Cheshire
Lots of libraries commented to me on how worried the staff "at the coalface" were feeling about this whole period of change. It's a reminder I guess to any of us involved in software development from a business or technical perspective, that the sometimes arbitrary decisions we take have serious impacts on users, sometimes foreseen, sometimes not.
This impact was fortunately entirely foreseen, hence our decision as long ago as June 2005 to announce that we would continue the existing service. A decision which many at the time saw as a rather hard-nosed commercial decision, but has in fact had really practical benefits for our users.
Another practical benefit emerging for users of Talis Source comes from the removal of restrictions on the numbers of users each institution can now give access to. We have just received a request for additional user licences from one library that wants to give every single branch access to at least search and view the bibliographic and holdings data in Source. Perhaps requests from branch will arrive at central ILL units with full bibliographic information AND a location to enable far quicker processing?
So, perhaps I shouldn't be suggesting that nothing has changed.