Professional Development

This morning began with a long run into spearfish canyon which ended in a driving cold rain. The terrain here is pretty dramatic and although I was soaked and freezing by the time I got back to the hotel, running between the rising limestone walls of the canyon was well worth it!

The conference picked up today with more coffee during the breaks and some interesting discussions with ExLibris customers. Yesterday afternoon the Voyager group within ELUNA was discussed and is now taking shape. There were a number of interesting poster sessions, including one which discussed making metadata records for Endnote/Refworks/Del.icio.us available within the OPAC. They used a number of interesting techniques including deep-linking urls, and actionable downloads. Another interesting poster by Linda Seguin and Laura Wrubel presented methods for using MARC record data to offer customized service options in an OpenURL link resolver.

The presentation and discussions on Verde showed me alot about the relationship between Verde and Meridian and what we can expect when we migrate. Verde has a similar architecture but approaches data management in a different way & there were a number of questions about how we could expect to migrate/manage data.

ELUNA is much smaller than the old Endeavor conferences and lacks coffee at the breaks but otherwise is very similar in content. The first afternoon session focused on the common ‘future of the ILS’ theme as seen through Ex-Libris eyes. The main concept discussed was the idea of the decoupling of a user interface from back office functionality. Ex-Libris touts Primo as their effort at the user interface and talked about things that would enable back-end systems to efficiently support this user interface (interoperability, service oriented architecture, standards driven). Questions focused on trying to differentiate these ideas from existing systems and wondering how libraries could implement these systems in a changing materials/user environment.

Other sessions today included an overview of primo, DigiTool, poster sessions, and the corning of several ex-libris staff!

Hi all from Spearfish, SD.

This morning saw the opening presentation at the ExLibris Users group for North America. The opening session included presentations by Matti Shem Tov (President & CEO), Robert Mercer (North American President), and Don Muccino (NA Customer Support). Much of what we have heard already has been reiterated, an emphasis on merging organizations, migrating Endeavor users to the Ex-libris product suite (except Voyager), and integrating the user base. Interestingly ELUNA is a much smaller user group and only a few Voyager sites are in attendance. So far the main problem is the lack of coffee at the between session breaks!