Trying to hammer out how exactly the ‘product working groups’ (PWGs) will work is the aim of this afternoon’s sessions. Unfortunately not the most thrilling business, but clearly essential for the user group to work well.

The constitution of IGeLU leaves a lot of flexibility to the PWGs about how they structure themselves, and currently it looks like the Aleph one is going to bear some resemblance to the old ICAU structure, with ‘module co-ordinators’ looking at specific areas of functionality.

This makes some sense, as Aleph is a large and complex product. However, it isn’t entirely clear what roles these co-ordinators will take, and what should be regarded as worthy of having a ‘co-ordinator’. This used to be based very much around the Aleph enhancement process, but this is also now up for discussion, which leaves a bit of a ‘chicken and egg’ situation.

An interesting progression is that ELUNA (the North American group) have decided to change their Aleph enhancement process so that they work with Ex Libris on a single area of functionality each year, rather than spreading effort over a larger number of small requests.

I have to say I’d really prefer to see IGeLU go down this route, as when I look at how tiny pieces of functionality crept slowly into the product (and are sometimes not even implemented to the satisfaction of the original requester), I don’t think the effort that went into the old ICAU enhancement process was ever worth it.