Trip to Indianapolis to attend consortial meeting
Yesterday was a pretty long day for me. Our library is part of the PALNI (Private Academic Library Network of Indiana) consortium and we had a consortial meeting yesterday at PALNI HQ, which is at INCOLSA’s offices. (INCOLSA is yet another library consortium but one that has a broader, statewide membership.) The meeting was the first-ever meeting of a group called the PALNI Aleph System Librarians. Since PALNI libraries share an integrated library system (Aleph 500 ver. 15.5) and since a big load is borne by designated system librarians at each member library in terms of the daily management of the system, this was quite an important event.
The reason it was a long day for me was that I was asked to give a presentation on macro software (I’ve attached the Word document here Macro Express.doc) Taylor has already purchased for use with Aleph, and I hadn’t had a chance to prepare anything up until the last minute. I was up at about 4a, got to work at 5a, and worked on the presentation until it was time to go to Indy at around 8a. After the all-day meeting, I then had to work the evening reference desk until 10p.
Anyway, the meeting was quite a success, in my opinion. I finally was able to put faces to names as I hadn’t met most of my counterparts before in the 23 libraries that make up PALNI. I also thoroughly enjoyed getting to meet one of the PALNI systems analysts face-to-face for the first time, someone with whom I have spoken on the phone and emailed back and forth for a long time, but had never met in person. Plus we as a group came to some important decisions about the system and how we’d like to manage it. This is a great first step to leveraging the power of a group to addressing the many complexities and demands of our implementation of this new system.
