ELUNA 2015

The 2015 Ex Libris Users Group of North America (ELUNA) conference was held in Minneapolis, Minnesota on May 5-8. It included four full days of programming about all of the Ex Libris (EL) products presented by a variety of practitioners as well as Ex Libris staff. The first morning was devoted primarily to a keynote and presentations by ELUNA leadership and Ex Libris staff. One of the things that I noted during the morning presentations was that Ex Libris considers libraries that migrate to Alma between 2015 and 2020 to be "early adopters." Meaning that we could migrate five years from now and still be considered to be in the forefront!

The program tracks were devoted to specific product lines: Aleph, Alma, Voyager, SFX, Primo, Verde, Metalib, Digitool, Rosetta. Ex Libris presentations generally demonstrated the latest developments in each of their products. Practitioner presentations address a wide variety of issues. Three of us attended from UAlbany, and we informally split up the sessions. I tended to go to sessions about migrating to Alma. The breakout sessions that I attended were:

• Keep calm and Alma on: implementing Alma in six months (at the University of Tennessee)
• Choice and diversity in acquisitions methods (Alma) (this was an Ex Libris session)
• Alma product update (also an EL session)
• Alma product working group meeting (led by Betsy Friesen, University of Minnesota)
• Planning and completing a full catalog RDA enrichment project in Alma (at the University of Minnesota)
• Alma Demo: Acquisitions (an EL session)
• What to expect when things are unexpected: how we went live in Alma and quickly practiced thinking on our feet, accepting change and letting things go (at the University of Minnesota)
• A collaborative review of Ex Libris Support (an EL session)
• 57 to 1: What are the odds? (presented by SUNY Office of Library and Information Services staff: about the One Bib merged bibliographic records project)
• Building a province-wide private research cloud for Ontario's academic libraries (this was unrelated to EL products, but of interest to academic libraries)

Presentations by the practitioners were very interesting. The keynote presentation on the first day of the conference was by Nancy Sims (University of Minnesota) and was called "User Stalking for Fun and Profit." While tongue in cheek, Ms. Sims demonstrated that it's almost impossible to make data anonymous. Even when you try to anonymize data, it can be de-anonymized easily with just one or two other data points, such as gender and zip code. It was very sobering, especially as libraries are looking at using student data to demonstrate the impact libraries have on the success of their students.

Presentations from the 2015 ELUNA Conference are posted here.

Minneapolis was a good venue for this conference, although it would be nice if everyone could fit into one hotel. Next year the conference will be in Oklahoma City.