Consortia Systems
The ELUNA Shared Systems/Consortia Interest Group last met in Knoxville, TN at the ELUNA 2006 meeting. The meeting was attended by about 25 individuals from 15 different institutions. We briefly discussed enhancement possibilities for Aleph that would serve the needs of shared system installations, and also went around the room to make introductions and briefly describe what projects/issues/challenges each of our institutions were facing with Aleph shared systems. At this meeting, we decided to expand the scope of the group and the discussion list to include Ex Libris products beyond Aleph, as many shared systems/consortia member institutions are also now involved with multiple institution configurations for SFX, MetaLib, DigiTool and Verde. We have not yet investigated the case with Voyager sites, although there are known shared Voyager sites, such as the GALILEO consortium in Georgia. The current discussion list, aleph_consortia, was hosted at MnSCU/PALS, in Minnesota. Rebecca Bell left the MnSCU/PALS consortium at the beginning of May 2007, and requested that the exiting aleph_consortia list be moved over to be hosted at Notre Dame. This provided a good opportunity to set up a new list with the expanded scope as we had planned for. The new list, ELUNA-CONSORTIA-IG-L, has been populated with subscribers from aleph_consortia, and over the next several months the old archives will be integrated into the ELUNA website. The Shared Systems/Consortia IG did not hold a meeting at ELUNA in Spearfish, as there were not any defined agenda items identified by the group to discuss. Pascal Calarco will be attending the Aleph Consortia Special Interest Working Group at the IGeLU 2007 meeting in Brno, to represent ELUNA Shared Systems IG, and participate in the discussion of the Aleph Consortia SWIG. It is our desire and intention to strengthen the links between the ELUNA and IGeLU interest groups, and the list membership for the ELUNA aleph_consortia and ELUNA-CONSORTIA-IG-L lists represents a global membership of interested Ex Libris customer sites. Over the next year, the ELUNA Shared Systems/Consortia will begin a process of rejuvenation of the group under the expanded scope and potential for greater collaboration with IGeLU. We will begin this by advertising the new list to the other product lists, and inviting volunteers to join the leadership of the ELUNA Shared Systems/Consortia IG.
