Since Millersville University Library will be transitioning to EBSCO Full Text Finder any day now, I forwarded a copy of the question which ran on Serialist last week regarding preparation for migration to FullText Finder to William Marshall, our Acquisitions Technician, who is not on Serialst.  He reports that, after a number of conversations with EBSCO and our Information Systems Librarian regarding the effect of the migration on LinkSource, what to expect, our migration timeline and so forth, he download and reviewed a copy of our AtoZ collection in preparation for the migration.

 

The file can be downloaded directly from EBSCO:

• Log into EBSCOnet and click the AtoZ tab.
• On the AtoZ Administrator page, choose the download/upload option under the Title Wizard tab.
• Select the ‘Managed and Custom’ and ‘Download All Columns’ options, then download and save the file as an Excel workbook.

FYI: Depending on the number of resource links in your collection, the file could be very large and may cause Excel versions 2003 and older to crash.

• Sort the spreadsheet by ‘Source’ and identify resources that are not 1-click tracking packages, e.g., singleton subscriptions or custom packages not managed by EBSCO.
• Sort the spreadsheet by the ‘CustomCoverage’ and ‘CustomEmbargo’ columns and identify any links that have been customized by your institution.
• Check the links that you’ve identified as well as any packages that are known to be problematic to ensure that the information in AtoZ agrees with your accessible content.
• Use the EBSCO Collection Editor to make any necessary changes to your tracking information.
• After making any necessary changes, download an updated version of the AtoZ collection, Update Rapid holdings, and save the copy in a secure location.
• Over the two week trial period, before FTF goes live, I will recheck the links and confirm that our custom holdings and packages are correct and that any changes we made to AtoZ also appear in FTF.
• AtoZ will not be deactivated until we are satisfied that FTF works as intended. If we identify any serious problems that cannot be fixed before the go-live date, EBSCO will roll us back to AtoZ until the problem is resolved.
• In the worst case scenario, your AtoZ collection backup file can be used to reset AtoZ to the point before the FTF migration.

 

I hope that is helpful to those of you still preparing for migration.

 

Teresa Weisser

 

Teresa A. Weisser—Cataloging and Metadata Librarian

McNairy Library and Learning Forum

 

MILLERSVILLE UNIVERSITY

P.O. Box 1002, Millersville, PA 17551-0302    

Phone: 717-871-7098 |  teresa.weisser@millersville.edu | www.millersville.edu

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