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.

This week I’m at the very first ‘IGeLU‘ meeting – this is the ‘International Group of Ex Libris Users’. Ex Libris are a software company which produce library software, and we currently use three of their products at RHUL, Aleph (the Library management system), SFX (the OpenURL resolver) and MetaLib (federated search).

Previously there were two individual user groups (ICAU, for Aleph; SMUG for SFX and MetaLib), and I remember discussing the possibility of a single usergroup 4 years ago, so I’m glad we’ve got there.

The new group and arrangements take up quite a bit of the agenda for the next 4 days, and while this may not be quite as interesting as getting into the detail of how ILL will work in Aleph 19 (more of which later I’m sure), it is important to setup how the usergroup will work, and how we will work with Ex Libris to further develop the products, and implement them in new and interesting ways.

This week I’m at the very first ‘IGeLU‘ meeting – this is the ‘International Group of Ex Libris Users’. Ex Libris are a software company which produce library software, and we currently use three of their products at RHUL, Aleph (the Library management system), SFX (the OpenURL resolver) and MetaLib (federated search).

Previously there were two individual user groups (ICAU, for Aleph; SMUG for SFX and MetaLib), and I remember discussing the possibility of a single usergroup 4 years ago, so I’m glad we’ve got there.

The new group and arrangements take up quite a bit of the agenda for the next 4 days, and while this may not be quite as interesting as getting into the detail of how ILL will work in Aleph 19 (more of which later I’m sure), it is important to setup how the usergroup will work, and how we will work with Ex Libris to further develop the products, and implement them in new and interesting ways.