To implement ILLiad in phases, you might start with the lending. It's simpler than borrowing. Later, after your Web site is complete and you've customized your e-mail notices, you can start borrowing.  And then electronic delivery.

The California Politech experience: "We brought up lending immediately after installation, since we weren't all that concerned with how the various pull slips, labels, etc. looked. (Since those are used library-to-library, they didn't need to conform to any campus "visual standard.") We just tinkered with those as we went along."

"Since borrowing has a much bigger impact on our own campus, we actually waited four months to bring it up. I would say that all the prep work was done in 2 months, but at that point it would have been peak semester, and we decided we wanted to wait until a quieter time. You'll need time to edit all the Web pages, and mail-merge documents and canned e-mail messages. You'll need to make choices and change settings in the customization manager for things like renewals, your overdues cycle—plus set the text for your reasons for cancellation, etc."

"Looking back, I'm glad we did lending first. It was fairly simple and gave us a chance to get used to the software generally. That made it easier to tackle the borrowing side. I strongly recommend a "test" period, when you let staff register, make "dummy" requests, etc. You might even ask another library to respond to these requests so that you can test the workflow before making it live. That's a critical step. We found, for example, that our e-mail notifications weren't being sent during the test period—and I'd much rather find out things like that before there are real users making real requests. (Atlas will clear out all the test registrations and dummy requests before you go live, by the way.)"

—California State Polytechnic University, Pomona

Last revised: 12 May 2003