ELUNA | Alma & Primo Enhancement Process

ELUNA is a not-for-profit educational group for users of enterprise library software products licensed by Ex Libris, a ProQuest Company. ELUNA focuses on the systems that manage discovery, access, and collection management functions within libraries. It is the international user community for Ex Libris customers in the Americas. ELUNA and its sister organization IGeLU have a contractual agreement with Ex Libris for the enhancement of defined Ex Libris products.

Source: https://el-una.org/about/

For 2024, the number of eligible ELUNA NERS voting California Community Colleges is 110 colleges - the California Community Colleges have more power in swaying the ELUNA NERS vote!

The Council of Chief Librarians (CCL) has paid the 2024 membership for all CCL members.

• Membership is by college.
• Please contact CCL directly if you have any questions regarding invoicing.

ELUNA Membership Benefits 

• Reduced registration fee at ELUNA Annual Meeting

• Access to ELUNA document repository

• Opportunities for professional development

• Regional User Groups

• Submit and vote on enhancement requests through NERS

The ELUNA and IGeLU Steering Committees negotiated the enhancement process to facilitate product development of Ex Libris products. Alma is awarded 200 development points annually according to the agreement. The “Development Cooperation” page at the IGeLU web site (http://igelu.org/development-cooperation) provides more information on procedures and partnerships.

IGeLU and ELUNA use the community designed and hosted NERS website (https://ners.igelu.org/) for the submission of enhancement requests and all voting. Each institution, as part of their membership in ELUNA or IGeLU, has a NERS account and will need to assign a member of staff to coordinate and vote on behalf of the institution.

The Alma enhancement process operates under the auspices of the IGeLU/ELUNA Alma Product Working Group. The PWG designates an Enhancement Coordinator to manage the process. That management includes communication with both the Alma community and Ex Libris, confirming the voting results, and following through to ensure that the enhancements are implemented fully within the enhancement year. Functional subgroups of volunteers form the Enhancement Team. As part of the communication with the Alma community, the Enhancement Team makes sure that the enhancements are written clearly and succinctly, and are appropriately scoped. The Enhancement Team and Alma PWG reserve the right to ask contributors to provide additional information, rewrite, scope and potentially remove the enhancement from voting.

The Alma/Primo Enhancement Process calendar year generally looks like:

• The community adds new enhancements into NERS. These can be added anytime, but a two week focused period is built into the schedule
• Enhancement Team reviews, deduplicates and verifies enhancements - Early February-Early March. Usually around 5-6 weeks
• First Round of Voting - 4 weeks
• Enhancement Team reviews results and prepares the top twenty enhancements, by vote, to send to Ex Libris - 2-4 days
• Enhancements to Ex Libris for pointing - Mid April to Late May - 6-8 weeks as the time includes the ELUNA annual meeting in May.
• Second round of voting on pointed enhancements - Late May to mid-June - 2 weeks.
• Tally results and send to Alma PWG for confirmation - 1 week
• Release results to ALMA-L and Ex Libris - once confirmed.