For the last several months, the Galter Health Sciences Library and the other NU libraries have been planning for the replacement of our existing enterprise-wide library management system, which holds and manages all of the catalog, circulation, purchasing, electronic resources management, and account records for every item held in any NU library and for everyone with circulating privileges at any NU library. The transition has been a monumental undertaking (the last such transition was 15 years ago) and many members of the Galter staff have been in leadership roles to facilitate this transition. The new system will allow the libraries to go green! No more due date slips for items checked out—they will be e-mailed.

The switchover to the new system (called Alma) is already underway and it is expected to take several days for all of the systems to completely switch over.  During most of this time, we expect that you should be able to search the library catalog and check out and return materials as normal. Since the upgrade primarily affects the staff view of the system, you should not experience any changes or problems when requesting or searching for library materials. If you run into any issues, please contact the Library circulation desk (312-503-8126 or galter-us@northwestern.edu) or your library liaison.

During the switchover period, both the older NUcat online catalog and the Galter Search aggregated search platform (library website search) will remain available.  At some point within the next several months, NUcat will be phased out. 

Note to Canvas or E-Merg users:

If you have any links to library catalog items in your Canvas or E-Merg page, or within a syllabus or document that is uploaded to Canvas or E-Merg, we strongly encourage you to check the links before the academic year begins.  While we expect all of our links to successfully migrate from the old system to the new system, some errors may occur, given the millions of links being transferred. Links to web pages unconnected with the Library catalog are not affected.