Quite a delegation!
This year IGeLU was represented by five people at the ELUNA 2016 conference, May 3-6 in Oklahoma City.
Theo Engelman (Chair), Mark Dehmlow (SC) Christian Hänger (Primo), John Krug (Analytics), Betsy Friesen (Alma), Rich Wenger (SFX) ,Cindy Greenspun (Voyager), Corey Harper (Linked Open Data) and Mehmet Celik (Interoperability) attended to the conference.
Mehmet was rewarded to be opening keynote speaker on the ELUNA Developer Day for his outstanding development work.
John had his maiden public appearance as the Analytics Special Interest Working Group coordinator, introducing this group to a hall full of curious people.
Content and networking
Ex Libris really surprised us with a very interesting presentation by Christine Stohn and Eddie Neuwirth, showing us the collaboration and integration of the metadata flows and indexing for the Primo Central and Summon Index.
And it’s always a pleasure to see how enthusiastic and skilled customers present their usage of the Ex Libris systems and add inventive and interesting innovations to them.
Besides the sessions programme the conference was very useful to catch up on contacts and cooperation in meetings and personal appointments.
It’s important for IGeLU and ELUNA that people who work so often and closely together get the chance to meet in person. Not only to talk business, but also enjoy some relaxing moments at social events.
It’s BIG!
The ELUNA conference is very big and it’s impressive to see so many people share a conference breakfast.
More than 600 attendees coming from all over the USA, including Ex Libris staff from Israel and a few IGeLU guests enjoyed a three day programme of user presentations and company updates.
Seeing the growth of Ex Libris, now developing and supporting the former ProQuest Workflow Solutions like Summon, 360 Link and Intota, it is very likely both ELUNA and IGeLU conferences will be bigger in the future.
It is challenging to think about this and brainstorm on ideas how to support for numbers of attendees we have never experienced.
A warm welcome
Looking at the way the conference was organized we noticed a very professional and hospitable attitude among the ELUNA staff. We are grateful for the way they hosted us.
Theo Engelman
IGeLU Chair