Sierra's My Lists Retirement Annoucement
It’s hard to believe, but we’ll be moving to a new discovery system in 3 short months. Once we switch from Summon to EDS, we will continue to have Sierra as our OPAC until Summer of 2021. Clicks on book records in EDS will take users to Sierra until we complete the switchover to FOLIO in the summer. (Something has to move the crane, right?)
However, when we switch to EDS we will be moving all of our search links to EDS, rather than sending users to Sierra for “Find Books,” “Find Journals,” etc. In anticipation of this change, we also will be disabling the “My Lists” feature in Sierra on December 18th. EDS has an account-based saved records system that is much more functional than Sierra’s My Lists, and we’d rather not introduce confusion among our users with multiple different “My list” features.
Today I launched a help entry that will walk users through exporting their lists to import into Zotero. It’s a little convoluted, but that’s what we get for letting people store records in a OPAC that hasn’t been redesigned since 2004. We don’t support RefWorks, EndNote, or other citation managers, and I don’t have time to keep updating the help entry, so I chose the only free and open source citation manager. In addition, Barbara and others have great information on Zotero in LibGuides, so users can get the most out of the tools.
In addition to the help entry, the My Lists page now displays a banner letting users know that the feature will be going away on December 18th. It also links to the help entry.
In the next few weeks, a message will also be added to the page when items are being actively added to lists. There are a little harder to target, so they will take a little longer.
Patrick got in touch with Sierra, and there are currently 1400 lists by users who have active accounts. I’m also tracking the usage of the “Add to Lists” feature to see how often this is getting used. If you know of a faculty member or student who uses the My Lists, feel free to reach out to them to let them know that the feature will be going away in December, to be replaced with something better.
If you have content in your LibGuides about using My Lists, now is a good time for you to update it.
Stay tuned for more details on the loss of RefWorks integration in our discovery system, too. I’ve been tracking the usage of the “Export to RefWorks” feature in Summon, and it’s practically a ghost town over on that button. That said, I am sure some folks have RefWorks accounts since it is sort of built-in to Summon. Rest assured that users will still be able to use RefWorks (it is a free basic account that isn’t tied to any institution) but it won’t be as “seamless” an experience as with Summon. (Seamless is in quotes there because ProQuest has managed to keep a lot of seams in the experience, honestly.)
Let me know if you have any questions!