The Alma Product Working Group members have been active in several areas, including program planning, web presence and documentation, and in soliciting participation from the wider Alma community. Our program chairs are diligently working to provide us with engaging programs at both ELUNA and IGeLU. We will have product updates and open product working group meetings at each conference, as well as several programs and panel discussions. There will be eleven separate sessions on Alma at the ELUNA 2013 conference. We hope to have as many or more at the IGeLU 2013 conference.
We continue to work on our web presence and gather information and documentation that is of interest to the growing Alma community. We have posted a spreadsheet for data clean up suggestions, Ex Libris has posted training documentation from one of our Alma institutions, and we are currently soliciting and compiling support incidents for a potential meeting with Ex Libris product managers.
The Alma PWG is working with Ex Libris to create second phase advisory groups for the Alma Community Zone. The names of sixteen ‘candidates’, received by the product group were submitted to Ex Libris. All of individuals had extensive backgrounds in metadata. Ex Libris will be announcing the next steps in the process in the next week or so.
Betsy Friesen, Alma Product Working Group Coordinator