The Ex Libris Users of North America (ELUNA) has an agreement with Ex Libris whereby the user group will identify enhancements to certain major products and the vendor will agree to implement them. These products include Alma and Primo, both of which FLVC currently has licensed on behalf of all 40 institutions. Because of this agreement, ELUNA has developed a process that allows members to recommend enhancements throughout the year and then annually vote on which enhancements should be implemented.
Only Institutional and Consortial members of ELUNA are allowed to directly vote on enhancements. Institutional members are libraries who pay an annual fee (currently $380) to become voting members of the user group. Consortial members (such as FLVC) pay an annual fee (currently $815) and are also a voting member. Consortial members represent all libraries affiliated with their consortium.
The Enhancement process begins in January and continues until the summer. It typically follows the timeline below:
Note: There is a separate process for Alma and Primo, but both follow a similar timeline. There is also an enhancement process for RapidILL and the Central Discovery Index (CDI), but they typically have a different timeline.
As of 3/4/2025, there are 20 Institution members (10 SUS, 10 FCS), one Consortal member (FLVC), and 20 Consortium Only members. (Consortium Only members are NOT permitted to vote.)
| Institution | ILS Coordinator (ELUNA Representative) | Membership Status |
|---|---|---|
|
Broward College |
Craig Amos | Consortium Member Only |
|
Chipola College |
Jane Stephens | Consortium Member Only |
|
College of Central Florida |
Carole Thompson | Consortium Member Only |
|
College of the Florida Keys |
Marcos Gonzalez | Consortium Member Only |
|
Daytona State College |
Elizabeth Martino | Consortium Member Only |
|
Eastern Florida State College |
Ashley Olund | Consortium Member Only |
|
Florida A&M University |
Ernestine Holmes | Consortium Member Only |
|
Florida Atlantic University |
Hansy Ambroise (colldev@fau.edu) | Individual Institution |
|
Florida Gateway College |
Christine Boatright |
Consortium Member Only |
|
Florida Gulf Coast University |
Danielle Rosenthal (Same) | Individual Institution |
|
Florida International University |
Jacqueline Radebaugh (Dalvys Perez) | Individual Institution |
|
Florida Polytechnic University |
Marcie Hoecker | Consortium Member Only |
|
Florida SouthWestern State College |
Richard Hodges (Peter Van Leeuwen) | Individual Institution |
|
Florida State College at Jacksonville |
Madeline Sims | Consortium Member Only |
|
Florida State University |
Valerie Boulos (Same) | Individual Institution |
|
Gulf Coast State College |
David Russell | Consortium Member Only |
|
Hillsborough Community College |
Diann Smothers (Lei Steelman) | Individual Institution |
|
Indian River State College |
Alexis Carlson | Consortium Member Only |
|
Lake-Sumter State College |
Kevin Arms (Katie Sacco) | Individual Institution |
|
Miami Dade College |
Angel Hernandez (Same) | Individual Institution |
|
New College of Florida |
Jeff Thompson (libraryadmin@ncf.edu) | Individual Institution |
|
North Florida College |
Windy Gamble | Consortium Member Only |
|
Northwest Florida State College |
Consortium Member Only | |
|
Palm Beach State College |
Robbie Allen | Consortium Member Only |
|
Pasco-Hernando State College |
Kayla Kuni (Ingrid Purrenhage) | Individual Institution |
|
Pensacola State College |
Maria Goodspeed | Consortium Member Only |
|
Polk State College |
Shannon Schane (Christina Fullerton) | Individual Institution |
|
St. Johns River State College |
Victoria Morris | Consortium Member Only |
|
St. Petersburg College |
Josh Brown (Marina Coelho) | Individual Institution |
|
Santa Fe College |
Jenna Miller (Same) | Individual Institution |
|
Seminole State College |
Morgan Tracy | Consortium Member Only |
|
South Florida State College |
Lena Phelps | Consortium Member Only |
|
State College of Florida, Manatee-Sarasota |
Theresa Smith-Ennis (Meg Hawkins) | Individual Institution |
|
Tallahassee State College |
Sila Lott | Consortium Member Only |
|
University of Central Florida |
Tina Buck (Same) | Individual Institution |
|
University of Florida |
Todd Digby (Same) | Individual Institution |
|
University of North Florida |
Jim Rickerson (Jennifer Murray) | Individual Institution |
|
University of South Florida |
Bonita Pollock (Same) | Individual Institution |
|
University of West Florida |
Liza Campbell (Stephanie Clark) | Individual Institution |
|
Valencia College |
Ruth Smith (libacq@valenciacollege.edu) | Individual Institution |
|
Florida Virtual Campus |
Wendy Ellis | Consortium (26 to 50) |
Remember, only libraries that are institutional members of ELUNA are entitled to vote on enhancements for the products that have ongoing licenses. For most FLVC libraries, that will be Alma, Primo, Central Discovery Index (CDI), and RapidILL. Information on how to join ELUNA as an institutional member can be found on their website at https://el-una.org/.
Voting is done using the Community Enhancement Requests and Voting (CERV) which is a website operated by the International Group of Ex Libris Users (IGELU). This site used to be called NERS, but it was renamed when they changed the interface. At the beginning of a voting round, the staff member designated as the contact person for each institution will receive an email message with a link to the ballot. The list of enhancements will display. Simply select an enhancement and choose how many points to put toward it. Each ELUNA member is given a total of 100 points, so a member can put all 100 points toward one particular enhancement or spread them out over several enhancements. When you are finished, click on Submit to lock in your vote. Once you submit your ballot, you cannot go back and change it.
If you have any problems or questions about voting, please contact ELUNA using this form.
2025 Alma Enhancement Timeline
Here are the voting results from the CDI Enhancements vote, in order of highest to lowest number of votes. Ex Libris is currently discussing next steps for implementing the enhancements with the highest number of votes.
The enhancement with the highest total votes (11,078) was #8722, the ability to hide undesirable CDI records. Second was #8829, allowing CDI full text availability matching on volume and issue, with 9,715 votes.
New for 2024, a range of CDI enhancements have been proposed to allow for increased competition with Discovery user interface and configuration enhancements. Any active member institution that licenses CDI via Primo or Summon can participate in the vote. 100 points will go to CDI, reallocated from Primo/Summon.
Here is a link to the 2024 CDI Enhancements Ballot. The enhancements recommended by the UISC are noted on the spreadsheet.
| April 1 | Go Live for accepting enhancement requests |
| April 30 | Last chance to submit new enhancement requests for this year’s voting in Aha! |
| May 1 - 30 | The Enhancements Team reviews, dedupes, scopes, verifies, transfers to other Aha! workgroups when necessary, and sets up the vote |
| June 2 - 30 | First round of voting |
| July 1 - 11 | The Enhancements Team reviews the results, and prepares them for Ex Libris to assign complexity points |
| July 14 - 25 | Ex Libris adds complexity points to the top voted results |
| July 28 - Aug 8 | Extra time assigned for clarification with Ex Libris |
| Aug 11 - Sep 5 | Second round of voting (if necessary) |
| The NERS agreement states that Ex Libris will develop the accepted enhancements within one year |
Suggestion for 2025 enhancements: Request form in Primo is the same one that is used for UBorrow, we'd like to be able to remove the pickup locations from article/digital requests. This may be addressed by Primo Enhancement #PENH-I-28351, Allow conditionality/logic toggles for fields in Primo Forms.
Process to update your software profiles in the ELUNA membership directories, please complete by Friday, July 27
Check RapidILL Roadmaps for planned enhancements before submitting: https://knowledge.exlibrisgroup.com/Rapido/Product_Documentation/RapidILL/RapidILL_Ideas_for_Development
Submission Process:
New Submission Method:
1 - Go to: https://enhancements.exlibrisusers.org
2 - Click "Don't have an account? Sign up"
3 - Create an account with username, email, and password
(Password requirements: 8+ characters, 3 of 4 types: lowercase, uppercase, numbers, special characters)
4 - Log in and click "Add a New Enhancement" button
The first round of voting for ELUNA/IGELU NERS Rapido/RapidILL Enhancements ended on October 17th. You can download the list of enhancement submissions here.
Note: Your institution must be an ELUNA member to vote & all voting institutions must have a signed Rapido or RapidILL contract with ExLibris.
The following four enhancements have been included in the 2024 Roadmaps. ExLibris will have one year to complete the developments.
| Request Title | Description | Proposed Solution | Product | Req. ID |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Add “Conditional” to RapidILL |
Sometimes libraries need to communicate things to each other that aren't citation issues. For instance, if a library has an HTML version of an article instead of a PDF with page numbers or a different edition of a book than the one listed in the request, that library might want to ask the borrower if that's an okay version for the patron. Right now the only way to communicate between libraries is through Bad Citation, and that doesn't allow libraries to respond to such queries. Adding a "Conditional" status that allows libraries to ask and answer questions that aren't citation problems would help patrons get the items they need instead of requiring libraries to guess at whether what they have is sufficient.
|
We can create a new Rapido action which will provide the ability to send an email to a partner library directly from within Rapido. The email will then be stored in the Rapido borrowing/lending request for later reference. | RapidILL/Rapido | 8558 |
| Configuration option for mandatory fields in the Rapido request form | Currently, there is no option for customers to set fields in the Rapido request form as mandatory (mark them with a red asterix, form can only be sent when field is not empty). However, it is not possible for libraries to fulfill requests where certain information is missing (e.g., no page numbers in digitization requests). We would appreciate if customers would become able to set any field in the form as mandatory such as it is already the case in the GetIt request forms in Primo VE. | Rapido | 8484 | |
| Prevent multiple requests from a same borrowing library within a short period of time |
Within a same day, we sometimes receive (in Alma) several RapidILL requests coming from a same institution for a same book or journal issue (native electronic materials or scans from physical materials): usually one request per book chapter, one request per article, etc., but sometimes, some of these requests are for multiple chapters or significant portions of a work. We assume that in most cases, these multiple requests come from a same requester, associated to the borrowing library. In addition to copyright issues that multiple request raise, it is unreasonable to expect a lending library to expend spending a lot of time to scan significant portions of a work. We don't expect any systematic mediation from borrowing libraries. This would increase the turnaround time, make the process heavier and slower for end-users and be in contradiction with encouraged integrations like Alma/RapidILL and Alma/Rapido. Instead, we would like lending libraries to have the possibility to limit the number of requests they receive from a same borrowing library for a same book or journal issue within a given (short) period of time. Example of configuration: "Maximum XX requests in YY hours for a same book or journal issue from a same borrowing library", where 'XX' and 'YY' would be numeric values to select from a drop-down list. Possible values for XX and YY should be defined in collaboration with the RapidILL and Rapido WGs. |
Development is for point one only: 1) Any new request matching the limits should be assigned to another lending institution that owns the requested material. We can develop lender configurations to support this. |
RapidILL | 8530 |
| Ability to query RapidILL lending library from Alma |
Sometimes we need to contact the library that supplied a RapidILL request to query the copy they provided. For example, supplementary material that was requested was not included, or the incorrect article/chapter was uploaded and sent to our user. At the moment, we need to find out the institution and send them an email. It would be much more efficient if we could query the 'completed' request via Alma to the Library. This functionality should update the request status and record the communication with the request. There is a Resupply request feature included in Rapido but is not currently possible within Alma Resource Sharing, so a similar solution would be useful. |
RapidILL/Alma | 8487 |
The first round of voting for Alma Enhancements opened on Monday, March 10, 2025 and will close on Wednesday, April 9, 2025. ELUNA's Alma Working Group released 238 enhancement requests for Alma that can receive votes. This first round of voting is designed to narrow the list of enhancements down to about 25-30 requests. A link to an Excel spreadsheet with a detailed description of each request is listed below.
Libraries who have an Institutional Membership with ELUNA are able to vote on enhancements. FLVC is a Consortial Member and will also cast a vote on behalf of the organization. FLVC staff will share with all the libraries which enhancements they support by March 20th. Typically, FLVC chooses 4-5 enhancement requests from the list. That list will be posted here.
After a careful review of the 238 individual enhancements for Alma, FLVC would like to support the following five requests for the first round of voting:
| Number | System Area | Title and Description |
|---|---|---|
| AENH-I-36462 | Administration | Build a User Role in Alma - Currently, the roles created in Alma are limited, which means a library has limited options as to what they can give staff. Libraries should have the opportunity to create their own user roles for staff in Alma and use the privilege report to only allow users to be able to do the specific tasks they need. |
| AENH-I-36393 | Acquisitions | Overview of Order Templates - Editing order templates is cumbersome. It should have the same functionality as PO Lines. Order templates could be listed with an easy overview of their features.They could even be bulk edited and deleted. |
| AENH-I-36355 | Resource Management | Add Find and Replace to MD Editor - The MD Editor should have a Find and Replace feature. This would be useful when editing simple corrections within one or two bib records. |
| AENH-I-36364 | Analytics | Align the Physical Item ID heading in Analytics and Manage Sets - The heading for "Physical Item ID" in Analytics should be recognized as a valid heading when creating sets in Alma. |
| AENH-I-36338 | Fulfillment | Add More Flexibility for Request Terms of Use Pickup Locations - There should be more flexibility when configuring pickup locations for requests in a request terms of use. |
FLVC will be casting their ballot with these five enhancements and would like to encourage other ELUNA members to support these requests as well. If your library hasn't yet voted, please do so by Wednesday, April 9th.
The first round of voting for Primo Enhancements closed on Wednesday, April 9th. According to the Primo Working Group over 61% of all ELUNA libraries voted in this round with a total of 66,790 votes cast. Below is a list of the top 20 enhancement requests that received the most votes:
| Rank | Votes | Request ID | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 3767 | PENH-I-28298 | Support the use of wildcards in phrase searching with quotation marks |
| 2 | 2984 | PENH-I-28385 | Remove incremental lazy load for Primo VE brief results when the number of results is set to 25 and 50 |
| 3 | 2376 | PENH-I-28371 | Add ability to select multiple options on Advanced Search drop down menus |
| 4 | 2341 | PENH-I-28292 | Searchable field codes |
| 5 | 2251 | PENH-I-28301 | Improve content matching for "Highlight reference entry on top" to preference newer content |
| 6 | 2180 | PENH-I-28340 | Combine Two or More Recent or Saved Searches |
| 7 | 2171 | PENH-I-28386 | Provide the ability to view historic requests including Alma Resource Sharing requests |
| 8 | 1953 | PENH-I-28383 | Add the ability to export to Excel in one file all Codes from all Code Tables and associated data under Discovery > Display Configuration |
| 9 | 1772 | PENH-I-28314 | Automated SSL certificate management by supporting ACME-like services |
| 10 | 1709 | AENH-I-36385 | Allow Online Services Order to sort by current coverage access |
| 11 | 1591 | PENH-I-28278 | Add a Resource Type for Abstracts in CDI |
| 12 |
1586 |
PENH-I-28355 |
Ability to search across sub-collections within a collection |
| 13 | 1557 | PENH-I-28389 | Increase number of possible local search/facet fields to at least 20 |
| 14 | 1431 | PENH-I-28362 | Research Assistant and local records |
| 15 | 1425 | PENH-I-28361 | Add a Research Assistant Configuration Tool |
| 16 | 1384 | PENH-I-28330 | Need efficient way to test discovery norm rules |
| 17 | 1370 | PENH-I-28360 | Primo VE home page: edit box |
| 18 | 1331 | PENH-I-28350 | Include Holdings library, location, and call number for physical items in Excel/CSV export |
| 19 | 1322 | PENH-I-28335 | Allow better patron control over research history stored in the Primo Research Assistant |
| 20 | 1282 | PENH-I-28294 | Book cover images for generic FRBR results |
Those listed in Red are enhancements FLVC recommended to our members. So, 3 of our 5 enhancements made it in the top 20.
Ex Libris staff will now review these 20 requests and score each of them on how difficult it will be to develop and implement. If needed, the Primo Working Group may ask for another round of voting in June to narrow down this list further. Otherwise they will negotiate with Ex Libris on which requests will be implemented during the next year. Stay tuned.
The first round of voting for Primo Enhancements opened on Monday, March 10, 2025 and will close on Wednesday, April 9, 2025. ELUNA's Primo Working Group released 89 enhancement requests for Primo that can receive votes. A link to an Excel spreadsheet with a detailed description of each request is listed below.
Libraries who have an Institutional Membership with ELUNA are able to vote on enhancements. FLVC is a Consortial Member and will also cast a vote on behalf of the organization. FLVC staff will share with all the libraries which enhancements they support by March 20th. Typically, FLVC chooses 4-5 enhancement requests from the list. That list will be posted here.
After a careful review of the 89 individual enhancements for Primo, FLVC like to support the following five requests for the first round of voting:
| Number | Description |
|---|---|
| PENH-I-28389 | Increase the number of possible local search/facet fields to at least 20 |
| PENH-I-36385 | Allow Online Services Order to sort by Current Access |
| PENH-I-28383 | Add the Ability to Export to Excel in one file all codes from All Code Tables and associated data, under Discovery>Display Configuration>Labels for Primo VE |
| PENH-I-28351 | Allow Conditionally/Logic Toggles for fields in Primo Forms |
| PENH-I-28310 | Allow "Exclude CDI ebooks" to apply only to the filtered search |
FLVC will be casting their ballot with these five enhancements and would like to encourage other ELUNA members to support these requests as well. If your library hasn't yet voted, please do so by Wednesday, April 9th.