Italian Users group
Proposal to redefine the submittance of improvements request to
Ex-Libris
1. Evaluation of the current request database
During the lates two years the management of the request database has been
the main activity of ICAU, together with the organization of the yearly
meeting. This is why it is necessary to evaluate the so far developed
experience. Despite the involvement and hard-working of the collegues who took care of it, the result cannot be
judged satisfactory:
- The management of the database turned out to be very demanding both
for managers and the users, due to the very high amount of requests and to
the complicated mechanism for evaluation. This concerned both costs and
human resources employed.
- The requests of the users, even the most frequent ones, scarcely
affected the last phases of improvement of the product.
Therefore, we propose to abandon the Request database experience
and to develop other solutions.
2. New proposal
The Italian group of Aleph users propose the following with the aim to:
- develop a new methodology to submit the requests of the users to
Ex-Libris
- propose a new function for ICAU, which will play the role of
commitment, and for the national and multinational groups.
The shares so far reserved to the database management should be integrated
(we propose to double them) and be actually used to support the
implementation of the approved requests through the here below reported
methodology.
These shares will be from now on referred to as improvement fees
and will represent one of the ways of improvement of the product, in
addition to what foreseen in the service contracts of each user.
Ex-Libris will be no longer asked to pay the yearly fee foreseen for the
ICAU database.
- a. Each national or multinational group will process a limited
number of proposals (from 3 to 5) to be submitted every year (the proposal
of individual installation will be no longer accepted).
These proposals arise from the discussion and the needs of the users and
refer to changes concerning the functions of the released product, we mean
by this that the development policy will still fall within Ex-Libris
competence.
- b. The Steering Committee collects and rationalises the list of
proposal to be submitted every year to Ex-Libris, as an average they will be
about seventy.
The proposal must be submitted to the Steering Committee within January
of every year.
- c. The list will be sent to Ex-Libris, which will be asked to
publish it immediately on its WWW. Moreover, Ex-Libris evaluates the
requests according to their feasibility and indicates which ones are already
included in the updates of the curre
nt version and those foreseen in the developments plans (reporting also the
release times).
The result will be notified to the Steering Committee and simultaneously
published on the WWW page of Ex-Libris within April.
The publications besides notifying each national and multinational group,
promotes the cooperation relationship between producers and users.
- d. The national and multinational groups vote the proposals
indicates as feasible and send the result to the ICAU Secretary within
July.
Each group has many points as the improvement fees paid by its
components are (ex. 5 shares are equal to 5 points).
- e. The four proposals which will get the higest number of votes
will be implemented using the improvement fees paid for the current
year, taking into account the current market price and the fact that
Ex-Libris will not pay the yearly fee for the ICAU database.
Execution times and modes are defined in the contract concluded between the
ICAU Secretary and Ex-Libris during the yearly meeting.
- f. The list will be written ex-novo every year, but the
groups can submit again the requests developed in the past yars.