Getting Started

Most people trying to get to know OLE will have familiarity with traditional software systems for library management, including vended offerings such as ExLibris' products Voyager and Aleph, III's Millennium and Sierra, SirsiDynix's Symphony and Horizon. Others may be familiar with the open-source products Koha and Evergreen.

OLE has two parents.  Its mother is a librarian: specifications for OLE were written by librarians with years of experience using these types of products, so the functionality needed to manage backroom library systems is available in the product.  Its father is Kuali, from which OLE gets its underlying RICE operating system. Features of Kuali/Rice are the use of e-documents, workflow and routing of those documents through the various processes, management of "persons" with various roles and permissions, and use of the Kuali Rules Management System for the circulation policies. 

A good way to start getting to know the product is to step through the documentation. 

Start with OLE Basic Functionality and Key Concepts. A helpful glossary is one of the links there.

Each currently existing module has an overview section that is very helpful:

Select and Acquire: http://site.kuali.org/ole/1.5.7/reference/html/OLESelectAcquireMEROverviewForUsersRevised.html

Deliver: http://site.kuali.org/ole/1.5.7/reference/html/DeliverOverviewForUsersRevised.html

Describe: http://site.kuali.org/ole/1.5.7/reference/html/DescribeOverviewForUsers.html

Admin: need overview link

OLE Video Tutorials

OLE Demonstration Library is the wiki page where all OLE videos are made available.  OLE Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) have created several video tutorial for the 1.5 release.  OLE 1.5 Demos section contain the videos: OLE Basics, a broad overview of OLE, demonstrations of all three of the modules, and Bib Import 101.

U of Chicago Approach

Stuart Miller of U of Chicago developed this intro session as the first course in a series of training sessions tailored to each staff person. All staff were required to take this basics course:

OLE Basics part 1 and OLE Basics part 2 Presented by Stuart Miller on June 20th, 2014. (mp4)

• Covers very basic features of OLE: What does OLE look like? How do you navigate around the interface? How to search for bibliographic, holdings, e-holdings and item records from the database?
• Outline: Introduction to OLE Basics

Getting Under the Hood

OLE, like all Kuali products, has a lot of tables, and the Maintenance UI is where all the tables can be populated. 

The spreadsheet at this link: https://docs.google.com/a/kuali.org/spreadsheets/d/1U5knuOE2cNuJMSYLHz3X_O2OKknSLE7iKl4A-Ylui6s/edit#gid=934970656 lists every link on the maintenance UI, its associated table name, and links to workbooks where the tables are further explained and examples are shown.

For detail on populating the OLE Chart of Accounts, see this link:https://docs.google.com/a/kuali.org/spreadsheets/d/1OwcrVlTeXfVVRmm36MhOqBJDr4LnhH0g_2Rc-h6UzHA/edit#gid=1994137331