At the moment in the UK we have an ‘Aleph’ Usergroup and a ‘SFX/MetaLib’ Usergroup. The former is quite formal, and the latter more informal.
With the new arrangements internationally, I do wonder how long this will continue to be practical. It looks like the next AUG and SMUG meetings will be held back-to-back in the UK, with hopefully some overlap discussion.
I’m really in favour of one annual meeting – more conference like really – for all Ex Libris users in the UK – more like the ELUNA conference in the USA, and with the large number of Ex Libris customer’s in the UK, I do think this is a viable suggestion. However, there are practical problems in organising a single large conference, whereas the small AUG-UKI meetings three times a year can be managed more easily perhaps (although finding volunteer sites with big enough venues for this is also a problem sometimes).
I would agree with all this. I would further argue that by moving to a more ‘conference’ type approach, getting a wider range of staff involved would be easier to do. One challenge though is that sites may not be happy to send off their head of circ, head of acq, head of cat etc to the conference all at the same time…