Marcia Barrett, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, won the 2019 Sherrie Kristin Memorial Scholarship, an award which honors Sherrie Kristin’s many contributions to the ELUNA community. Marcia was presented with the award at the ELUNA 2019 Annual Meeting earlier this month, and contributed the following report on her ELUNA conference experience.
My institution became an Alma/Primo VE library less than a year ago, and my attendance at the ELUNA 2019 Meeting enabled me to learn from colleagues from around North America, to hear from Ex Libris about specifics on roadmaps and product improvement efforts, and to attend a meeting of the California ELUNA Regional Users Group. At the University of California, Santa Cruz, I will be the lead for the library’s upcoming reclamation of our holdings in OCLC WorldCat. This project will enable us to improve our service to users by increasing the accuracy of our catalog and improving our ILL process by fixing erroneous holdings. Two ELUNA sessions provided both a high-level overview and detailed steps for the reclamation process. I shared what I learned at those sessions with our holdings reclamation team, and that information has given us more confidence in our planning process.
Another topic of great interest is Linked Data and how Ex Libris products may support that. At the meeting of the Linked Open Data Working Group, I learned that there are several resources to further education in this area. The Working Group has created a dashboard that details Linked Data functionality in Ex Libris products. I’ve subscribed to the Working Group’s monthly newsletter and plan to review the group’s offerings on the IGeLU and ELUNA Linked Open Data Show & Tell YouTube channel. Combined with the LOD Working Group meeting was an Ex Libris presentation on their Linked Open Data Roadmap. I was very excited to learn that Search Engine Optimization to make catalog data visible on the web is in development and that by next year, we could be cataloging new resources as Linked Data.
In an Ex Libris session, I learned that the move to Primo VE is complete and the focus now is on improving the discovery experience. The addition of images to search results is on the 2020 roadmap, and I know this will be met with a lot of excitement at my institution. A current way to make collections more discoverable is through the online exhibition of collections. This topic was explored further in a session devoted to creating Alma collections to highlight certain collections in Primo such as new books or faculty publications. A different session has already informed local decision making about using Alma’s authority control functionality.
Attendance was high at the first meeting of the California ELUNA Regional Users Group. It was helpful to learn which institutions in the state are or will soon be Alma libraries. A listserv will foster communication between ELUNA meetings, and a goal of the group is to hold a meeting in 2020. Such a meeting, whether physical or virtual, will allow a higher participation rate by library staff who generally do not travel for professional development opportunities.
The ELUNA Meeting was extremely well organized and that facilitated a wonderful conference experience. Many thanks to those involved in making this happen! I’m very grateful for the opportunity to attend, and I feel tremendously honored to be the recipient of the 2019 Sherrie Kristin Memorial Scholarship for the ELUNA 2019 Meeting.
