The first Alma Analytics EPUG-UKI SIG away day
23 Oct 2014Well, what was it? Social get together, workshop, unconference, extended chat, exchange of experience, inaugural SIG meeting? A bit of all that. I’ve written up the day on the wiki we agreed to set up. These are personal reflections on the day.
We met at the British Library conference centre at Euston on Tuesday 14 October 2014, following the EPUG-UKI. I’d chosen the place and time for proximity to that event on the assumption it would make it easy for people to attend and hence more likely to. No, only four were there on the day before of the 18 who were able to attend on the day. I don’t think I’ll worry about that again although we did say at the end it would be good to meet next on the day after the EPUG-UKI in April. It’s the nature of the UK transport economy that it’s usually easier for everybody to get to Euston, London than it is, for example, to get from York to Lancaster.
I had never organized anything remotely similar before, so it was extremely useful to have a room at the British Library, with badges and catering arranged by Andrea Stubbs. I used Eventbrite to manage registration and SurveyMonkey to collect some feedback.
I was up early on the day and nervously waiting from 8:30 for people to turn up, which they duly did with only a couple unable to make it. Seventeen people including myself where there. This seemed to indicate a reasonable interest in establishing an Alma Analytics UKI SIG.
I had deliberately not created an agenda, just suggested a list of topics we might wish to discuss. We began with some extended introductions in an attempt that people would get to know each other, have some idea how others were working and hoped to be working with Analytics.
We spend some time discussing SCONUL reporting, the perceived documentation problems, issues with requests and usage reporting. I think it’s fair to say that Lancaster, Sheffield and York are a few months further on with reporting than other institutions which, in some cases, have only had Alma for a few weeks.
After lunch, I was feeling that the three of us had been dominating discussions, so I proposed that we try some ad-hoc report construction tutorials. Edinburgh Napier people suggested a couple of reports, and we showed how to go about constructing the desired report in Analytics. This demonstrated the user interface and the use of filters and was effective in giving a feel of working with Analytics.
The feedback received from 14 attendees indicates that 100% thought the day was worthwhile and 100% would come to another one. The next meeting will probably have a little more of a structured agenda, but I want to maintain some form of participant control of content on the day. I think it’s quite likely the next meeting will have more participants. I think there will be scope for splitting into groups for participant driven tutorials or mini ‘hackathons’, topics decided on interest and level of experience. The feedback indicated demand for more of this type of activity.
We decided we would try to have the next meeting following the EPUG-UKI AGM in April 2015, probably in London again. We would endeavour to have it in a computer lab or with as many laptops as possible at the BL.
We finished about 4 o’clock. I got back home to Lancaster at about 8. A tiring day for me.