An interesting poster session from Roskilde Bibliotek in Denmark. They have started to accept online payment for Aleph fines. They do this very simply with a 3rd party service called ‘DIBS’ (http://www.dibs.dk) which handles the credit card payment, and communicates with Aleph.

The workflow is that the user logs into Aleph, sees payments due, and chooses to pay them. They click a button which passes them onto the DIBS website, with the correct amount ready to pay. They enter their details (credit card number etc.) and click ‘pay’, and DIBS accepts payment, and passes details of the payment back to Aleph.

It wasn’t completely clear how this last bit of communication was achieved – apparently programmed by Fujitsu (who are the Aleph distributers in Scandanavia), but the presenter though it had been done using the x-server.

We’ve always been slightly wary of taking card payment for fines, partly because of the transaction charge is high on relatively small amounts. However, in this case, they were passing the charge on to the user (approximately 10-12 pence per transaction), and this seems to be accepted.

I’m not sure this would be accepted in our library, but perhaps we could support this when the fine is over a certain amount?

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.

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.

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).

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).

ELUNA is ‘Ex Libris Users of North America’. Because the North American market is an important one to Ex Libris, and because ELUNA (previously NAAUG – North American Aleph Users Group) is large, they have traditionally had a large influence over development – in a way most national user groups have not.
To be honest, this tends to work well for RHUL, as ELUNA is exclusively (I think) academic libraries, and there are quite a lot of issues in common with the UK University library sector.
I suspect that there will continue to be a large amount of agenda setting from ELUNA, but with at least one ELUNA member also on the IGeLU steering group, this should work OK I think.

ELUNA is ‘Ex Libris Users of North America’. Because the North American market is an important one to Ex Libris, and because ELUNA (previously NAAUG – North American Aleph Users Group) is large, they have traditionally had a large influence over development – in a way most national user groups have not.
To be honest, this tends to work well for RHUL, as ELUNA is exclusively (I think) academic libraries, and there are quite a lot of issues in common with the UK University library sector.
I suspect that there will continue to be a large amount of agenda setting from ELUNA, but with at least one ELUNA member also on the IGeLU steering group, this should work OK I think.

An important aspect of the new IGeLU organisation is the establishment of ‘Working Groups’. These will be based both around products (Aleph WG, SFX WG, MetaLib WG, etc.) and ‘Special Interest’ Working Groups.

The idea is that these can be formed by any members of IGeLU – so a very flexible arrangement – although they must inform the steering committee that they are forming.

I would think there will be special interest working groups for consortium or shared services, and probably public libraries – as these already existed in ICAU. It will be interesting to see what else comes up.

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…

During the Chairman’s report, he has covered the role of ‘working groups’ in the new organisation. These are intended to promote product development – in the way that the user community has in the past pushed for product development in specific areas (e.g. electronic resource management – which resulted in the Verde product, and search interface – which resulted in Primo)

We need to think about the areas where development is needed, and the Chair has suggested, almost as an aside, that ‘e-books’ could be such an area.

This is interesting, as e-books were discussed in the development of Verde, and in theory Verde can help manage e-book collections. I’m not sure though, how well it fulfils the need here, and when we were working with Ex Libris on Verde we did recognise that e-books were not really understood yet, and the requirements for managing them unknown.

I can’t decide if e-books are a big issue for (academic) libraries or not. For RHUL, the largest e-book collection we have is EEBO (Early English Books Online). However, we buy and manage this basically as a single item – pretty much like a database subscription.

With the Google books developments and the Open Content Alliance, there are increasingly large numbers of ‘free’ e-books online. I can’t really see a future in which individual libraries try to manage all of these titles. I suspect that we need to re-think our expectations of user behaviour for e-books. If libraries are to engage with these collections at a title level, I suspect that this is more likely to be via federated searching than by cataloguing – this is where products such as MetaLib and Primo start to be used.