After a year of implementation, the Colorado School of Mines Arthur Lakes Library went live with the Ex Libris Alma resource management solution and the Primo discovery and delivery solution on June 3, 2015. The implementation process involved an unprecedented and extremely successful collaboration between Library, Information Technology and Enterprise Systems teams. 

Alma allows Library staff to manage all of the Library’s scholarly resources and media types in a unified system, while Primo enables users to search all resources types from a single user-interface, and receive a single, relevance-ranked result list.

It provides patrons with services via secure logins based on Mines Identity Management Systems.

The Library was keen to implement Alma, a cutting-edge, integrated solution, which handles electronic, print and digital collections in a unified and streamlined approach, as well as provides highly-intuitive and efficient workflows that will lead to cost savings and more time for staff members to focus on services for Mines users.

Alma also adds new functionality that will benefit Mines students and staff.  For example, we have implemented an On-Shelf Request service which allows patrons to select available materials and have them checked out to their account and moved to the Front Desk for pick-up.  This is just the first of many new services that facilitate research and study we intend to implement.  Another functionality that looks quite promising is a service that allows Primo users to request print journal articles and book chapters held by the Library to be digitized and delivered to their email inbox.  A third is a booking service that would allow Primo users to schedule in advance access to those rare archival materials that we hold which do not leave the building.

You can give our new Primo discovery and delivery solution a test drive by clicking on this link:

http://mines-primo.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=01COLSCHL

Joni Lerud-Heck, Director of the Library, jlerud@mines.edu

Laura Guy, Systems Librarian, lguy@mines.edu