Moving to the Next‐Generation System: A Case History of a Vendor's Approach Available to Purchase

In 1983, Utlas International, a major bibliographic utility and a vendor of a range of automated services and systems for the library community, reached a point in its corporate development where massive technological change was unavoidable. Feuer details the procedures adopted by Utlas to migrate to a next‐generation system. The process involved three major stages: planning, system conversion, and implementation. He notes techniques employed to keep sub‐tasks manageable, to maintain a schedule, to instill a sense of accomplishment in staff members, to facilitate communications among project teams and all individual staff members, and to extract that most necessary and elusive component of a major development effort—documentation. The experiences in this case study are relevant to libraries that are implementing new systems, and particularly to those libraries that are migrating to next‐generation technologies.