Got back from ELUNA Wednesday night. First, let me just say that Knoxville is great. I probably would have never thought about visiting there without having a conference to attend. My wife, Pam, came with me and she was just as impressed as I was. Good restaurants. Nice parks. And we had fun going for walks along the riverfront. Thank goodness my wife did not make it to the outlet malls in Pigeon Forge, or my credit cards could have taken quite a hit!

I just wanted to throw up a few comments on ELUNA. I have no desire to provide a commentary on each session I went to - some of them weren't all that interesting. I'm sure other bloggers are doing this though (I know NeoArch blogged the conference too). ELUNA is a smaller conference (about 400 attendees). I think the group is beginning to mature somewhat. The accommodations and food at the conference this year was excellent, by the way, and the University of Tennessee deserves a big thanks for helping make it all happen.

Some highlights for me:

• Ex Libris, as a company, continues to see growth. They consider themselves one of the last three major ILS vendors standing, and intend to keep gaining customers. By far, the most interest right now is in their Primo product (which can run as a standalone product). A close second would be their Verde product. Electronic resource management is very hot right now.
• With the reorganization of NAAUG into ELUNA, it was announced that the enhancement process as it exists today is going away completely for Aleph. This will be after version 20 of Aleph, for which enhancements have already been gathered. In its place, users are supposed to propose 1 big idea for the software that will have an 18 month turn-around on development. From everyone I spoke to about this, it seems that no one is quite sure how this is going to work yet. Very much still in the conceptual form.
• In version 18 of Aleph, the course reserves and ILL modules will be integrated back into the GUI. No more clunky separate interfaces for these modules. This was good news!
• Ex Libris has committed to provide a report on it's compliance with accessibility issues by ELUNA of 2007.
• Ex Libris is making progress on making sure its customers catch up to current releases. They want to have most people on v. 16, 17, & 18 by the end of next year. This progress is going well in the US, but still worldwide about 50% of customers are below version 15.
• The ILL interest group I attended was very helpful. I was pleased to hear of the progress of some organizations like SDLN and CCLA. I was very excited to hear that the implementation for most people was less painful than they expected, and that user satisfaction seems to be pretty good. The one big concern that I have had for a long time was whether or not OCLC could be configured as a provider, and everyone reported that with a recent patch, this should be possible now and should work, but no one had done it yet. Most people are just using it to share within their consortium. It seems like a lot of the kinks have been worked out though.
• I reaffirmed my conviction that our generation of custom SQL scripts for reporting is really the best way to go. In the systems and reporting session, most people reported little success with the ARC product. On the other hand, numerous people are doing cool things with SQL, and it is much more flexible. Sure, it takes some expertise, but we are lucky enough to have that here at PALNI. I was so interested in this conversation that I volunteered to coordinate an official SQL Interest Group for ELUNA that will hopefully help facilitate the sharing of everyone's SQL scripts. This type of sharing is the really valuable product of these conferences.
• X-Services for Aleph and the product as a whole seems to be maturing, and an Interest Group has formed to help give input to the company as to how it should be developed. I suspect in the near future we will see some really interesting things come from schools who are doing custom programming using the x-services. For now, I will look forward on seeing some examples and maybe some better documentation on how x-services work and what the possibilities are.

Well, that's a few of my highlights from ELUNA. It was a fun time, and next year we are headed to Spearfish, South Dakota!