The Universidad Tecnológica de la Riviera Maya (UTRM), in Playa del Carmen, Quintana Roo, is part of the model of bilingual, international and sustainable universities (BIS). Its library serves 3,773 registered users with a collection of 5,744 titles and 10,353 copies. It operated inside the SADBIBF consortium system (formerly SIBISUT), the network of libraries of the technological universities, which ran on Janium. When the network shut down, the library needed a system of its own to keep providing service, and in September 2026 it moved to an instance on JaniumNet, Janium’s cloud service. Six calendar days passed between sending the quote and the first day in production.
Leaving a shared system
In a consortium system, several libraries share a single installation: each one has its own records, copies and users, but everything lives in the same database. With the network’s closure, the UTRM had to separate its own content from the rest and take it over in full, leaving nothing out of its operation and carrying over no data from other libraries.
That the source and the destination were both Janium explains much of the speed. The catalog was already in the format the new system expects, and the loans and fines did not have to be translated from another circulation model. The work consisted of extracting the UTRM’s portion, loading it into its instance and checking that every transaction still pointed to its user and its copy.
Six days, with a test in the middle
The quote went out on Wednesday, September 9. On Friday the 11th the university’s purchase requisition arrived, and that same day the service was activated and a test migration was run with the real data. The test serves to review the result before committing to it: if a loan cannot find its user, it is fixed in the extraction and not in the system that is already serving the students.
With the test validated, the final migration took place on Monday the 14th and the system went into production that same day. The weekend in between left the cutover outside the library’s service hours.
What was moved
The migration included the catalog and also the library’s operations: who is registered, what is checked out and what is owed.
| Component | Figure |
|---|---|
| Bibliographic records | 5,744 |
| Copies | 10,353 |
| Users | 3,773 |
| Active loans at the time of cutover | 60 |
| Returns (history) | 20,020 |
| Fines | 2,503 (2,195 paid and 308 pending) |
According to the project’s closing report, 100% of the information was migrated. The transactions add up to 22,583, and each group serves a different function in the new system. The 60 loans that were in progress remain open, so those books are returned in the new instance with no additional steps. The 308 pending fines keep the debt, and a student who owed before the cutover still owes afterward. The history of 20,020 returns maintains the collection’s usage statistics, which otherwise would start from zero on September 14.
What it runs now
The UTRM subscribes to Janium as an annual service on JaniumNet: Janium hosts the system on a high-availability server, administers it and delivers the new versions released during the year. Library staff work from the browser with eight concurrent licenses, on these modules:
- Cataloging, with label and barcode printing.
- Public catalog at
utrivieramaya.janium.net/opac, with unlimited searches. - Circulation, with user services and chat: loans, returns and fines.
- Inventory, which makes it possible to take the physical inventory without suspending lending.
- Digital objects, for images, text, audio and video, with a full-text index and a progressive zoom viewer.
The service includes security, administration and reports, remote technical support Monday through Friday during office hours and access to Janium Academy for six members of the team.
What the library says
Araceli Fonseca Sanchez, head of the library at the UTRM, described the project this way:
The project was developed with the necessary support at every stage. The Janium team showed willingness to address our needs and provide timely guidance, allowing the implementation to be carried out with favorable results for the UTRM’s library services.
And on communication after the go-live:
I especially highlight the team’s willingness and patience in resolving questions, handling technical requests and providing support during the process of implementing and operating the system.
What this case shows
When the shared system a library depends on shuts down, the library can move to one of its own without losing what makes it work day to day: the loans in progress, the fines to be collected and the usage history. In the UTRM’s case it helped that the source and the destination were the same system, and the order of the steps did the rest, with a test on the real data before the cutover and the final migration outside service hours.