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On March 16-17 I attended the OCLC International Conference in Dublin, Ohio with five members of the USMAI Resource Sharing Task Group: Beverly Gresehover, Robin Moskal, Carol Vaeth, Tanner Wray and Stephen Miller. Our primary purpose for attendence at this conference was to host a panel discussion on the topic of the USMAI consortial implementation of ILLiad.
Our panel discussion was on Thursday, March 16th. The presentation involved a description and brief history of the USMAI consortia, the processes and timeline involved in the decision to purchase ILLiad and a detailed outline of the implementation plan. For my part of the discussion I described ITD's progress on the consortial implementation of ILLiad, as well as ITD's experience and methods for supporting a consortial application. The presentation was well attended. We received very positive and supportive comments regarding our implementation process and plan from Dan Specht, Director of Operations for Atlas Systems, the developer of ILLiad. Representatives from SUNY also gave us positive feedback on our work.
I was also able to attend some additional training while at the conference. Genie Powell from Atlas Systems conducted a session on customized interfaces for ILLiad. Genie detailed how customers can be presented with different web interfaces based on their patron status, and how they can receive different levels of service according to the options they choose. Other than our previous onsite training in Februrary, this was my first look at the "guts" of the configuration setup in ILLiad.
The sharing of common experiences is one of the great benefits of attending these conferences. Other sessions I attended included a discussion of loading patron data into ILLiad by the University of Kansas, a presentation by Saginaw Valley State College of Michigan on their experiences in customization of the ILLiad application, and a very detailed report by representatives of the State University of New York (SUNY) on their work in measuring resource sharing performance within selected members of the SUNY consortia using ILLiad and transaction analysis tools.
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