Scott Schuetze, Ex Libris

Libraries around the world play an active role in driving the future of library services. Ex Libris leverages the power of its user community to accelerate innovation by promoting information sharing, encouraging feedback, soliciting ideas, and allocating resources for user-nominated features across its service offerings.

This customer orientation has always been a focal point for Ex Libris, but over the past year it has gained greater exposure with the addition of Summon as a flagship discovery service. We have seen great effort and enthusiasm from both the IGeLU and ELUNA organizations to welcome Summon customers into their user communities, providing a platform for Summon customers to become even more engaged and involved.

The combined efforts of Ex Libris, ELUNA, IGeLU, and Summon customers to come together to build a greater community is a key factor in the continued development of Summon. The power of this community collaboration is manifested in upcoming user meetings, product working groups, and idea exchanges. Here are some highlights:

2017 ELUNA Annual Meeting & IGeLU Conferences

There are great things happening this year at both the 2017 ELUNA Annual Meeting and the IGeLU Conference. The ELUNA meeting program consists of more than 20 sessions pertaining to Summon and 360 Link – including presentations from Summon customers and updates from Ex Libris Product Management – and will present numerous peer networking opportunities. The IGeLU program will undoubtedly offer just as much opportunity for customers to walk away with practical information about Summon, learn how to optimize Summon to meet institutional goals, and discover how Ex Libris is delivering continuous product innovation throughout 2017.

Summon/360 Link Product Working Group

The Summon/360 Link Product Working Group (PWG) maintains contact with Ex Libris product management on a regular basis to raise concerns, share information, and more. Established in mid-2016, after conversations between Ex Libris and the customer community, this joint IGeLU/ELUNA working group has been very influential in improving quality assurance, collaborative testing, releases, and annual user conferences. In 2017 the PWG will be instrumental in the rollout of the New Enhancement Request System (NERS) for Summon, where customers suggest and vote on new features.

Idea Exchange

The addition of Summon to the Ex Libris Idea Exchange reflects a commitment to further develop Summon to the benefit of libraries worldwide. Already used for several Ex Libris solutions, the Idea Exchange is a unique platform that provides all customers the opportunity to post ideas for enhancements and extensions to Summon, while offering feedback and voting mechanisms to further support the development of these ideas. Beyond this, it facilitates transparent communication directly between users and the Ex Libris product management teams about what users consider to be development priorities, whether for Summon product feature development or Summon content enrichment.

The path to greater library impact can be shortened by leveraging the power of smart community collaboration. This same concept of community is what will propel Summon forward into the future, as a result of the collective strength of Ex Libris, our customers, and the resources of both ELUNA and IGeLU.