For a long time, my team read release notes the way I imagine most people do: quickly, right before a meeting, and with mild dread.

Every quarter we would review the Alma and Primo VE updates and then repeat the same conversation six different times—once with each of our three working groups and again with our three advisory committees. We’d speculate about what a feature probably did based on screenshots. We’d guess which workflows it might affect. And most of that context never made it beyond the committee representative.

It wasn’t very efficient, and it wasn’t particularly engaging. More importantly, it wasn’t helping the staff across our 30+ libraries feel ready for change.

So in late 2024, we tried something different.

Instead of discussing the release notes in six separate meetings, we started hosting a single open webinar for all CUNY library staff. We call it Shelf Help, and we schedule it the Thursday before Ex Libris pushes updates to production. The timing matters: people get a chance to understand what’s coming before the changes land.

The format wasn’t the only thing that changed, though. The bigger shift was how we prepared.

Rather than summarizing the release notes, we started testing them.

Before each session, we read through the release notes line by line and try the new features in our Alma and Primo VE sandboxes. We decide which changes are actually relevant to our campuses, build examples and walkthroughs, and then share the recording and documentation afterward so people can revisit it later.

Instead of saying, “Here’s what the notes say,” we can say, “Here’s what this does in our environment, and here’s what to watch for.”

We launched the first session in November 2024. A year and four sessions later, we typically see around 70 registrants with roughly 80% attendance. After that first session, we sent out a short survey: 89% of respondents rated their satisfaction as high, and 100% said they wanted the series to continue.

The comments were encouraging:

“Reading a long list of release notes is overwhelming. The format chosen made the information much more accessible and understandable.”

“I really appreciated seeing updates outside my functional area; they still impact the staff that I supervise.”

“I love Shelf Help! I know it takes a lot for the three of you to prepare. I’m grateful.”

It does take time to prepare each session. But it saves far more time across the system. And just as importantly, it reduces anxiety. No one enjoys logging in one morning to a changed interface and a flood of “What the heck happened?” emails.

What this experience has reminded me is that support doesn’t always mean creating something brand new. Sometimes it means taking something dense and scattered—like release notes—and turning it into something shared, practical, and easier to navigate together.