ELUNA 2024 Annual Meeting Report: Jeff Karlsen
By Jeff Karlsen, Sacramento City College
I began by attending Developers Day+, a series of single-track sessions delivered over two days focusing on integrations, APIs, and so on. Attendees and presenters included everyone from the tech-curious to full-blown software engineers, with presentations ranging from birds-eye theoretical (how do we control for bias in development work?) to exploratory (can ChatGPT write normalization rules? Short answer: no) to the “wait, what—how are you doing that” (a demo on how to intercept Primo code at a base level and redirect it to third-party services—never mind!). At DD+ I presented on my district’s Canvas integration, specifically the way we embed course-specific links to items on reserve.
The most exciting DD+ presentation was—and this is not typical for a user group conference—from an Ex Libris employee, who demonstrated the forthcoming Alma add-on Open Library Workflows. Ex Libris is licensing the N8N platform, which allows one to visually connect various web services and data transformations. In the Alma version, the tool will natively recognize all of Alma’s APIs and be able to receive Alma webhooks. In other words, it will (for a price TBD) allow us to better automate various processes without writing a bunch of code. I think this will be really, really good.
I’d recommend Developers Day+ to those who write some amount of code and/or get deeply involved with integrations that require extensive collaboration with IT. Be aware, though, that some of it will sail over your head. One idea floated for next year’s event was to provide some Angular-focused sessions for customization of the New Development Environment (i.e. the Primo successor), which is scheduled to be in production by that time.
The Annual Meeting proper is a mix of plenary sessions, presentations by ExL product leads, forums from working groups and other ELUNA bodies, and peer-to-peer sessions in which library personnel present their own initiatives, challenges, and discoveries.
The plenaries from Alma senior leadership are one of the odder elements of the conference. While sometimes containing new info—did you know that Alma-D is going to be replaced by a new digital archiving product, Specto?—they also have an element of weird corporate showmanship and spin, like a LinkedIn post come to life. At one point a speaker showed a clip of a TED Talk; the TED talker then appeared in a video in which she greeted, Cameo-style, the ELUNA attendees of whom she knew nothing; then it turned out that Ex Libris had brought dozens (hundreds?) of copies of the TED talker’s book (some sort of management/self-help thing) to give out for free to attendees. Hm. At the end of the opening plenary, one Alma customer memorably countered: “You are talking a lot about AI and innovation. But I don’t need these things. I need a product that works and is well-documented.” AI? Aieee…
Sessions featuring Ex Libris product leads in conversation with library personnel were interesting. Librarians are, it turns out, uneasy about our vendor’s forays into using generative AI to create Community Zone metadata—especially as this gets into subject headings. I also attended a forum hosted by the Analytics Community of Practice, which, among other things, has been pushing for better documentation of Analytics subject areas.
Like everyone else, I went to a lot of sessions, which are inevitably hit-and-miss, but frequently spurred some sort of idea in relation to my own work. Highlights:
• A session detailing Orbis Cascade Alliance’s attempts to share network-wide reports with member institutions. There’s no easy path to doing this sort of thing; it can’t be done without extra steps and creative solutions.
• One library’s extensive work on increasing the automation of their reserves. This was interesting because the reserves process is very laborious. I’m not sure I could imagine my library doing anything as extensive as they have, but it’s a reminder to keep one’s eyes open for opportunities to streamline.
• One library’s project on using Oracle Data Visualization (DV) to study the geographic diversity of their collection. This was interesting to me because so little has been provided on how to use DV. I’m hoping to use it more in the coming year.
• I went to a few sessions touching on discovery imports, i.e. externally-hosted data that that, with some massaging via normalization rules, can be made to appear in Primo without creating records in Alma. We have not implemented this sort of thing yet, but it seems like something we should pursue to get our externally-hosted special collections listed in discovery.
In addition, I attended the meeting of our state ELUNA affiliate, eCAUG. There I learned that the CSU system is eager to engage in print resource sharing. If we want, we can sign up with their courier and implement “peer-to-peer” resource sharing. If anyone is interested, they can contact Chris Lee, cwlee@calstate.edu.
ELUNA is a real treat for those of us who spend a lot, maybe too much, time wandering through the Alma/Primo labyrinth. It was terrific to connect and reconnect with so many CCC people on the scene, as well as other California folks familiar from eCAUG and elsewhere. Sure, one ends up consuming a lot of hotel food and spending most of the day indoors, but to me it’s well worth it, and getting CCL’s financial support for the experience made it all very easy. Next year in Atlanta?