IGeLU 2026

Conference

This talk will delve into how crises can be the best medicine for workflows that have gone stale or unimagined. Like everyone else in U.S. libraries, we were scrambling to get our materials and services into ship shape for Title II compliance, while remaining daunted by the sheer enormity of the task.
I knew we would be leveraging local fields (Esploro) for some of this work, and I can admit that at the outset I thought: how can an outlier strategy help us on such a grand scale? Would it come out right on the other end (front-end search)? As a librarian, I’m used to using tools for reasons other than what they might be originally purposed for – but would this be just another temporary fix?
The outcome of this was a rethinking not only of how we could leverage local fields, but of how specific workflows put in place early on were functioning in the first place.This was a win-win and it feels miles ahead of where we could be as a small staff tasked with a huge lift.

IGeLU 2026 theme: "Pearls of Technology: Think deeply, explore widely"
Practical Applications
Strategy

Accessibility
Esploro / Converis