ENUG Conference 2018

I’m in rainy Albany, NY at the Ex Libris Northeast User Group Meeting. A lot of schools here are making the leap to Alma and Primo in the next year, so we feel like old timers! We’ve been live since June! The conference opened with a keynote panel featuring Allen Jones from the New School and Mark Sullivan from the IDS Project with Jill Morris from PALCI and Kristina Rose from NYU joining remotely. The keynote topic was consortial resource sharing with a particular emphasis on making the experience better for users when the borrowing environment is complex.

Next, I attended a session called Who’s the student? Users Teach Librarians to Embrace Primo by M. Anne O’Reilly from CUNY’s LaGuardia Community College and Maureen Richards from CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice. They have been using Primo since 2014 and found that use of the product exploded, but their librarians were not using it in bibliographic instruction. They had some very practical advice for other institutions dealing with librarian buy-in. They actually found a lot of true “discovery” benefits, like users were accessing their ebook collections a lot more. This should not be surprising, but it feels refreshing!

I also took a tour of the Dewey Graduate Library here at Albany. The building opened in 1909 as a gym and was converted to a library some years later. They had beautiful murals depicting the history of the city and stained glass windows donated by different SUNY Albany graduating classes.

In the afternoon, I attended the plenary session which was a product update by Tom Hall, Strategic Account Manager for Ex Libris. He talked about updates to security and the development of the Ex Libris Trust Center.

The last session I attended on Thursday was What is the Analytics Special Interest Working Group and What Does It Do For the Ex Libris User Community? by Kathryn Silberger from Marist College. She had great recommendations for learning more about the analytics platform including Ex Libris extended training. The Working Group has an FAQ for their work and maintains a running catalog of issues with analytics.

On Friday I attended a session about resolving Primo issues in a patron-focused way by Emery Shriver at Williams College. The next session I attended was also from Williams College and focused on fulfillment policies. After that, I went to the session presented by my colleagues Mary Beth Weber and Colin Bitter about the OCLC reclamation process. ENUG was a great conference and a very supportive community!