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.

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.  OLE gets its underlying Rice operating system from the Kuali Foundation. Features of Kuali/Rice are the use of e-documents, workflow and routing of those documents through the various processes, management of users 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 also available from the user documentation.

Each currently existing module has an overview section that is very helpful, see Module Overviews: Introducing 3 modules to learn about Deliver, Describe and Manage, and Select and Acquire.

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.

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