The last six months have been busy for the IGeLU Primo/Metalib Working Group. We are very happy to have had the NERS enhancement process concluded in an orderly and timely manner this year, with a total of five top-winners accepted for development by ExLibris. (See https://igelu.org/archives/11848 for details.) Enhancement lead Bettina Kaldenberg and the rest of the joint IGeLU/ELUNA enhancements team deserve credit and gratitude for their outstanding work in getting this through the editing, clarification, and voting process.
Another focus point has been the work towards better accessibility for the Primo new UI – which is now the standard UI for both Primo and Primo VE. From the Primo WG, Lee Houghton has been the lead on this effort, which was also detailed in the last News in Brief, and has now led to increased, and documented, accessibility for the ExLibris Discovery product line.
The split between Primo and Primo VE continues to raise community questions and this is a very central question for the Working Group. At the moment, we are particularly chasing the signs of divergent development for the two products, which we see as a cause for concern. As a follow-up from last year’s Primo VE summit in Jerusalem, Amin Hussain is leading a group of volunteers to produce suggestions for improved Out-of-the-box MARC21 normalization rules in order to require less customer intervention. Moreover, there have been panel discussions in both the ELUNA and IGeLU conferences in order to raise awareness of the two Primo “flavors” and the concerns of the WGs. This is undoubtedly an ongoing concern.
The Working Group itself is undergoing some changes. During the last six months, Lauren Ajamie (University of Notre Dame), Annette Schuyver (Macquarie University), and Wei Xuan (University of Manitoba) have all left the group – Wei to join the IGeLU Steering Committee. We thank them for their great work, and wish them all the best going forward; it has been a pleasure to work with them in this volunteer network. During the first two weeks of October, an election will be held in NERS to fill the open spots; there are already several candidates. Also on the internal front, Stacey van Groll is now our deputy coordinator, replacing Bettina Kaldenberg, who has chosen to step down from that role. Thank you Bettina for your great deputy work, and thanks to Stacey for agreeing to the position.
The Primo WG is intensifying its cooperation with other working groups. We already have excellent collaboration with the Alma WG (thanks to liaison Amelia Rowe) and the Analytics WG (thanks to Stacey, who is the liaison), and look forward to establishing as good a relationship with the Content WG. Of course, we are also very grateful for our close cooperation with our sister Primo WG in ELUNA, and I would like to extend thanks to them and their chair, Corinna Baksik.