Now we have candidates for the chair and steering committee for the new organisation.

For Chair there is only one candidate – Jirke Kende. Jirke (or Jiri) has been very involved in ICAU (the previous Aleph users group) being on the steering committee, and also coordinating the enhancement request procedure. Although there will be formal voting at lunch today, there isn’t much doubt that Jiri will be Chair – and I’m happy that he will do a good job!

For the steering committee there are 6 candidates for 5 positions:

Ana Azveda (from Portugal – Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto)
Beate Rusch (from Germany – KOBV)
Dale Flecker (from the USA – Harvard)
Dr Ronald Schmidt (from Germany – HBZ Cologne)
Michelle Newbury (from the USA – Florida Institute of Library Automation)
Pat Busby (from South Africa – CALICO)

Quite a lot of familiar names here, and I’ve met all the candidates over the last 6 years at SMUG and ICAU conferences. Interesting that the US and Germany are represented strongly, and a bit of a shame that the UK not at all – although I’m guilty of not feeling able to commit enough time to successfully be part of the steering group.

Anyway, this looks like a pretty good field for the steering group – results tomorrow…