Registration is limited to 75 individuals. Please complete the form below and return by June 14, 1996 to:

Name ____________________________________

Title _____________________________________

ILUG Member Library _______________________

Email ____________________________________

The Innovative Law Users Group is hosting a free luncheon for III Systems Managers from ILUG member libraries on Saturday, July 20th, in conjunction with the Annual Meeting of AALL in Indianapolis. The luncheon is scheduled from 12:15 p.m. until 1:30 p.m., in between the ILUG Workshop in the morning and the ILUG General Meeting in the afternoon. A III Systems Manager is defined as the primary contact person who is responsible for the day-to-day system management and problem solving for their library's III system. The details of the luncheon will be confirmed with you once we know how many people are interested in attending. One representative per ILUG member library may attend. Please indicate below the individual from your library who would like to attend this event and return this form or send an e-mail message by June 14, 1996 to:

ILUG Member Library: _____________________________

Individual Attending: ______________________________

Title: __________________________________________

Email: _________________________________________

Please indicate if you have special dietary requirements.

This was my first IUG meeting. I had attended an ILUG meeting at the AALL meeting in Pittsburgh.

I strongly encourage all III users to try to attend the IUG meeting next March in Oakland if at all possible. It was tremendously informative and helpful.

I am in patron services, and I dreaded several days of discussions of MARC tags and subfield delimiters. The IUG meetings are now taking on a much broader dimension, with much more attention being given to the end users and their needs. Perhaps the most helpful session I attended was on screen design, the better ways to present information about your system and its capabilities on the terminals in your library. It suggested a number of criteria to use in setting up or revising screen displays, including suggestions for further research and reading.

The meeting as a whole was packed with information, so much so that I felt I had learned more by the end of one day than I do by the end of the whole AALL annual meeting. Part of it was that the location was compact, without being congested. But more of it came from the variety of presentations, all focused on one thing -- III systems. Some of the meetings were presented by III staff, to inform us of new features, to review existing features whose potential might be being neglected, or to help new users decide how best to optimize their system. Other meetings were organized and presented by IUG members, speaking from their own experiences and methods of using an Innovative system.

One very good feature was the 'birds of a feather' time. This consisted simply of the opportunity, at certain times, for those with a common interest to get together to discuss it. Some 'birds' meetings had been arranged in advance through the listserve. But at the meeting itself, there were posters listing available rooms and times (lunchtime worked very well, since box lunches were available) in chart format. Attendees were encouraged to pick a topic, time, and room, and write it on the chart, thus inviting everyone else interested in the same thing to come and talk. I put a topic on the board on Sunday, pretty well convinced that I would be eating alone come Monday lunch, and was stunned to find about 25 people there who wanted to know more about it.

Being a relatively new user of the circulation module, I had trepidations about my ability to contribute to the whole meeting. However, I noticed that in one 'birds' session, the most experienced user of that feature was helped by a relatively new one, who simply asked whether 'create lists' could not be used to perform the needed task. The experienced user had been too close to the problem to see a solution, the old forest and trees problem. In all sessions, there was lively exchange of ideal with questions and answers freely offered. Often, while I did not participate overtly in these, I was trying out my solutions mentally, and was encouraged to find that I was on the right track more often than not.

There were over 700 people in attendance, close to double the prior year. The group was not dominated by either technical services, patron services, nor system administrators, though often this last group also wore hats in one or the other 'services' units. The program usually had at least 5 concurrent programs, with some being repeated several times during the meeting for schedule flexibility. Still, there were programs that neither my colleague nor I could attend, even though we wanted to. The very impressive 2-inch binder of materials sometimes helped us decide which sessions to attend: if the handouts seemed clear and directly usable, we felt safer in attending other sessions. We will be ordering the tapes as well. This year they had professional video-recording of all meetings that occurred in one particular room.

The program materials also included alphabetical lists of all registrants, as well as a list of new users, and another list of users by library type. All contain affiliations and contact information, very helpful for future use. Next year, I plan to take a tote bag to hold the materials. All I had with me this time was a slender brief case, although it proved helpful.

If you're an Innovative user of any level of experience, you really would benefit from attending one of these meetings. For the new user, it gives you a much better understanding of the potential applications of the system. For those at the system administrator or similar policy-making level, it offers tremendous insights into solutions to problems you are or might be facing, as well as some (private) relief that either you handled that one as well as could be done, or you avoided it entirely by forethought and planning, or you're just plain glad that you don't face the problems that they do.

Tell the "money people" that you need to come next year. You will probably find it very worthwhile.