The SPARK Support portal is full of questions and ideas for implementing the most effective workflows and policies right now. We are also planning for the upgrade to 3.3. Please continue to be patient as we work through a long list. If you have an open request that you believe needs immediate attention, please call directly and we’ll set a priority timeline together. If something is stopping your success, PaILS staff wants to empower you to move what stands in your way.

Here’s a little update of things to come. Our support site is moving to a new host soon. Our timeline isn’t set in stone, as we are in a testing phase now. We are working with a trusted vendor who also supports open source projects to ensure it is smooth. We anticipate 2 hours of downtime on our support site. The new support site will offer access to 5 users. I anticipate for right now, the accounts will be assigned as: 2 to 2FTE PaILS staff members and 3 to Committee Leadership. We aim to build knowledge books and documentation that will offer support before, during, and after migration, as well as opportunities for the Community to share more of what you do. We learn from each other–that’s the best thing.

Support staff will be changing the way we categorize requests and will soon institute a priority rating system. Upon entry of a support request, you will have an opportunity to rate Urgency, Importance, and Impact: whether the issue effects just your location/system/a resource sharing consortium/all of SPARK/or the Evergreen Community. That will help us get the best results from our limited human time and prepare to hire new support staff in the future.

SPARK Support plans to post instructions for a sort of “Open Enrollment” period strategy for making certain changes. If you want to make a change to a shelving location, policy, or catalog link in the middle of a month, that’s fine, and that can happen, but some changes are best first tested, and then to be put into the live Production with the start of a month or quarter. We will offer “Review/Change Your Catalog Links” Month and “Shelving Location Analysis” Quarter, among other activities to encourage community participation. Having a clear change management process will make reports better and ensure we have communicated the changes and their impact on all stakeholders. I hope to present a draft of a calendar for community input soon.

The best is yet to come. Share more; have more.

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Thank you.