Such a great event!
It is hard to believe but the wonderful conference in Budapest is over! Many colleagues from the Working groups and the Steering committee and especially our colleagues from the host institutions in Budapest were working hard for months to make the conference as successful as it was – with 430 attendees the biggest IGeLU conference ever! But all the effort was absolutely worth it – the conference location was perfectly organized, anytime and anywhere helpful staff at hand, helping to solve any issue arising. Both social events, the wonderful reception in the Parliament just as well as the beautiful trip through the night of Budapest were wonderful and offered a lot of space for networking with colleagues and Ex Libris and also for the premiere of the new IGeLU song by Mark Dehmlow and Lucas Koster!
What a programme
The conference itself was very exciting with 2 inspiring keynotes, the many elaborated user sessions, the clear signs of a close collaboration of the user community with Ex Libris on issues like the further development of the SaaS environment, Alma UI and analytics or structure of the KnowledgeBases. It was also interesting to hear about the development plans of Ex Libris for their product suite and to experience again the great general Q & A session where any relevant topics come on the table and are answered by a broad panel of Ex Libris management, this time including even the “Chief of the suicide services” ;-) The good atmosphere of the session where also difficult questions are posed shows the good spirit between the users and the company.
1st Developers day
The conference in Budapest was also very special because of the adjacent first Developers day which was a great success and which surely will be repeated next year in Trondheim .
The end of an era
Here in Budapest it was also the end of my last term as IGeLU Chair and I am happy to pass the association in a great shape with so many active and enthusiastic colleagues to Theo Engelman who is going to lead IGeLU in the next years. I was strongly moved by the beautiful farewell my colleagues gave me and I can only repeat that in all those years I was happy to serve the user community and to learn so many wonderful locations and people.
Want to see the presentations?
All user and IGeLU presentations are available, the Q&A sessions and PWG meetings will become available soon and all Ex Libris presentations are published on the Documentation Center
Here once more a big thank you to all involved for the magnificent conference we had again the privilege to experience!
Jirka Kende, Steering Committee