ELUNA 2024 Annual Meeting Report: Michele Alaniz
Thanks to the generous funding from CCL, I was able to attend the ELUNA Annual Meeting for the first time in Minneapolis last May. It was a 3-day event packed with numerous sessions presented by Ex Libris users and vendors. It was an excellent opportunity to see how other libraries are using various Ex Libris products to meet the needs of their community, but also to hear about successes, strategies, pitfalls and how these institutions make changes or improve their processes. I also thoroughly appreciated the community aspect of the presentations. It was extremely useful to get insight from presenters and attendees alike during the sessions.
Over the last few years, I’ve focused mainly on discovery in my role at City College of San Francisco but have recently had to shift focus to co-managing systems while our systems librarian is on sabbatical. With that in mind, I attended sessions that focused on discovery, systems and analytics – anything that can help me to build on my current experience. While I attended numerous useful sessions, I’m highlighting the following 2 sessions because I might be able to use these most immediately in my work.
• Looking for Trouble: Using Alma Analytics To Find Problems in Your Catalog
o Lybarger from University of Kentucky Libraries suggests several strategies to locate problem areas in the catalog. This includes looking for clues in facets or running reports and analyzing specific locations in report data. Her reports can be found in the shared community folder in Analytics. They can be repurposed for other institutions to use on their own data. Report details and examples can be found in the PowerPoint presentation
• Springshare Integration with Ex Libris Tools
o In this quick paced and useful session, presenter, Talia Richards-Resendes discussed using the Resource Recommender, but also covered how libraries can integrate Libguides into the search results via OAI-PMH. In this method, library guides appear as a material type, and it’s also possible to swap out “Research Guides” in title. To see this in action, try a search at Seneca Libraries. While tempting, this approach does appear to require ongoing maintenance. She also mentioned plans to pull LibInsight data into Alma Analytics for ACRL reporting.
In my experience, it did take a few sessions to find my rhythm at the conference and to adapt to the time zone. I recommend having back-up choices, and to be ready to switch to another session if your first choice doesn’t meet your expectations or if it fills to capacity. Also, be sure to utilize the category feature in the online conference schedule to narrow down relevant sessions. Take advantage of the ample coffee, tea, water and snacks available at the conference to stay awake and hydrated. Also, if you’ve never attended, don’t miss the first-time attendee reception. On a sidenote, I wish conference planners would have dedicated larger rooms to some of these sessions.
I highly recommend attending this conference. It was an incredible opportunity to participate in a conference so focused on my immediate needs, but to also engage with such smart and creative people with the same goal of making their collections discoverable. I also appreciated being able to meet up with other California Community College librarians in person. If I do end up making it to ELUNA in Atlanta next June, I will likely try to include Knowledge Days in my plans. In the meantime, I do plan on attending eCAUG in Long Beach this October. See you there.
Michele Alaniz, Distance Education Librarian, City College of San Francisco
Systems Work Group, 2024-25