Letter from the CEO |  |
Dear Colleagues,
Welcome to the twelfth issue of the Ex Librian newsletter, marking six years of activity as a communication channel between Ex Libris and the customer community.
The theme of this issue is the power of aggregation, and I’d like to share with you a few thoughts on this subject.
In some fields, the effect of having “more of the same” can be predicted. For example, in mathematics, we know that the same rules that apply to small numbers apply to large numbers. However, in many other fields, we cannot assume that behavior that occurs with a small number of elements will bring about the same results when large numbers are involved. With a larger number of elements, new properties might appear, altering the way in which the elements interact with each other and the way in which an aggregation of such elements interacts with external entities. A pertinent example is data in the scholarly information arena.
Over the last year, Ex Libris embarked on major programs involving data. Although the Company remains a software vendor, we have developed two services that are data based: bX, the first-of-a-kind article recommender service, was launched in May 2009 and has already gained the high regard of industry stakeholders; and Primo Central, a mega-aggregate index of scholarly materials, is undergoing beta testing at the time of this writing. Both of these services require Ex Libris to host very large amounts of data, process the data, and offer it to our customers. It is the immense global body of information that makes these two services not only viable but also extremely effective.
The bX recommender service derives from research conducted by Johan Bollen and Herbert Van de Sompel at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The recommendations are generated from data originating from tens of millions of discovery sessions at hundreds of institutions around the world, sessions that are logged by SFX® link resolvers. Ex Libris harvests this data, mines it, and analyzes it to produce useful recommendations for scholars. The widespread use of SFX is fundamental to the creation of a global network in which scholarly discovery sessions performed by researchers who have a common interest, regardless of their institutional, regional, and national affiliation, form the basis of the data from which recommendations are generated.
The second data-related initiative on which Ex Libris embarked over the last year is Primo Central, a centralized index of scholarly materials that complements the institutional Primo® search environment by enabling it to offer global and regional scholarly electronic resources together with physical and digital materials from the library. Relying on a single search solution makes sense for researchers only if they trust the search environment to provide practically all the materials that they need. Primo fulfills this trust by offering a very large information landscape that brings together scholarly materials from the full spectrum of information providers, disciplines, and types of material.
These large aggregations of data empower scholars in an entirely new way. However, we need to be cautious to ensure that such quantities are a blessing rather than a curse. Thus, Ex Libris has built mechanisms that enable libraries to offer the best available information and that enable scholars to hone in on the items that are relevant to their research. bX is one such mechanism.
The large Ex Libris customer base, which has grown almost tenfold in the last decade, also helps illustrate the power of aggregation. The manner in which community members interact among themselves and with the Company and the roles that the community has taken upon itself are exerting a great influence on the ways in which we are all moving forward.
Wishing you an exciting and fruitful year,
Matti Shem Tov
President and CEO, Ex Libris |
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Four Things You Might Want to Know About the Open-Platform Program | Four Things You Might Want to Know About the Open-Platform Program | 1
The EL Commons Web site has been upgraded, the Developer Zone has gotten a new name—CodeShare—and you no longer have to log on to access customer code contributions. Check out the new, easy-to-use interface of the CodeShare site. (Click on the image to open CodeShare).
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Ex Libris developers got together with developers from customer sites at two recent Developer Meets Developer forums, held in early November 2009 in Jerusalem and in early February 2010 in Chicago. Both meetings were stimulating and fruitful. The presentations are available on CodeShare, for both the November forum and the February forum.
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At the beginning of November, Ex Libris launched ELympics, a competition for writers of code extensions to Ex Libris products. Valuable prizes will be awarded to the creators of the best code extensions that are submitted during the competition, which will end on March 31, 2010. The winners will be announced on May 31, 2010. For more information, go to http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/category/ELympics.
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A year after its launch, EL Commons is gaining momentum. Here are some interesting statistics about the use of this collaborative site.
During November 2009, 4,513 visits to the EL Commons site were recorded and 35,717 pages were viewed (an average of 7.9 pages per visit). Unique visitors numbered 2,396 and came from 67 countries. The following chart shows the 10 countries with the greatest number of unique visits:
Excluding the entry pages, the six most popular pages of CodeShare were the Aleph code contributions page (577 visits), the Aleph open interfaces page (346 visits), the Aleph X-Services page (328 visits), the Voyager code contribution page (218 visits), the Primo open interfaces page (214), and the Voyager open interfaces page (204 visits). The presentations from the Developer Meets Developer forum that took place in November triggered 242 visits.
Another statistic that you may find interesting is that our community tends to use Firefox more than other browsers.
Since the opening of some EL Commons pages to guest users and to Web search-engine crawlers, more and more people have been reaching EL Commons through search engines. In November, direct traffic accounted for 67.45% of the visits; search engines, for 18.26%; and referring sites (sites with links to EL Commons), for 14.29%. At the beginning of January, however, direct traffic accounted for only 50.18% of the visits, whereas search engines accounted for 32.13% and referring sites, for 17.70% of the visits.
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Primo Central in Action | Primo Central in Action | Tamar Sadeh, Director of Marketing, Ex Libris
At the end of 2009, only six months after the development of Primo Central was announced by Ex Libris, this mega-aggregate of scholarly materials went from theory to practice. During the end-of-year holidays, the Ex Libris implementation team began activating Primo Central at Ex Libris library partner sites for testing. A new component of the Primo® discovery and delivery system, Primo Central enables institutions to expand the Primo search scope to include not only local collections but also global scholarly materials. Results originating from Primo Central are blended with local results, yielding one relevance-ranked result list (figure 1).
Figure 1. A blended result list at Vanderbilt University. Click to enlarge
The University of New South Wales was the first partner institution to start testing Primo Central, at the beginning of January, 2010. At the time of this writing (the end of January), the following libraries have begun testing Primo Central:
- University of New South Wales (Australia)
- Vanderbilt University (U.S.)
- Oxford University (U.K.)
- Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium)
- Cooperative Library Network Berlin-Brandenburg (KOBV consortium), which includes Humboldt University of Berlin, the Free University of Berlin, the University of Mannheim, and the Technical University Berlin (all in Germany)
- Yonsei University (South Korea)
Next in line are the following institutions:
- Brigham Young University (U.S.)
- Michiana Academic Library Consortium, which includes the University of Notre Dame, Saint Mary's College, Bethel College, and Holy Cross College (all in the U.S.)
By the second week of February, we expect all Primo Central library partners to begin testing. MetaLib® Primo Central partners will start testing Primo Central as a MetaLib resource at the end of March. In mid-2010, Primo Central will be available to all Primo customers; it will be activated gradually at MetaLib customer sites during the third quarter of 2010.
One of the greatest benefits of the Primo system is that it serves as a single point of entry from which users can search in all library collections. Libraries, in presenting their own collections—library catalogs, digital repositories, course materials, and more—are taking advantage of the capability of Primo to enhance library data through the system’s integration with data-related library and non-library services such as those offered by Amazon, Syndetic Solutions, and OCLC WorldCat®. In addition, Primo customers have been demonstrating a high level of innovation in customizing the system, integrating it with other library and institutional systems and services, and developing mobile and other alternative interfaces for users. Indeed, the statistics bear out the popularity of this system. At New York University, the average number of scholarly search sessions per day increased from 4,000 before Primo was implemented in September 2008 to 10,200 a year later, while the average duration of a session decreased from 15 minutes to six minutes during that period.[1] Yonsei University in Seoul reports similar statistics.[2] Clearly, Primo users are finding what they need much faster.
Primo also enables libraries to extend the scope of the collections they offer to their users through Primo by harvesting metadata from other collections and presenting those collections in a way that is transparent to end users. For example, Boston College has added to its local Primo index more than 170,000 records from the University of Michigan’s MBooks collection,[3] and the University of Minnesota, a HathiTrust member,[4] has added over 600,000 HathiTrust records to the university library’s local Primo index.
It was only a matter of time until Ex Libris started leveraging one of the fundamental elements of the Primo architecture—the capability to search in distributed index segments—so that the search scope of Primo could be extended even further and in a way that accommodates all Primo libraries. Because of the global nature of academic research, it is clear that library users, regardless of their geographic location and institutional affiliation, are interested in the same global resources. The availability of these global resources along with local resources renders the discovery process streamlined and rapid for end users. However, harvesting such global collections and adding them to a local Primo index is not a feasible solution for libraries. The Primo Central index, which Ex Libris maintains and makes accessible to all Primo libraries, offers an efficient, cost-effective solution. Mark Dehmlow, of the University of Notre Dame—a Primo Central library partner—explains:
Given that library budgets are finite, library managers will always need to set priorities for the types of projects we engage in. It is increasingly clear that we must use our personnel and fiscal resources to add value that our governing institutions and users can understand and appreciate, leveraging what makes us stand out from other institutions, e.g., digitizing rare books and special collections, creating metadata for unique items that haven't been cataloged anywhere, and customizing their systems to meet their patrons' specific needs.
Medium-to-large institutions will likely continue to locally host many of their core services and systems for the foreseeable future, but there’s a problem of scalability for libraries to host and manage all of the data that are useful to us. In my mind, Primo Central is the "right scale" software as a service (SaaS) for aggregating the growing body of licensed and free content. While the advantage of hosting this content on a single infrastructure is obvious from the perspective of search efficiency, the process for acquiring and managing this data locally would be arduous at best for libraries and, more importantly, would divert our valuable resources away from projects that can add the most value for our institutions. My thinking is that it is worth the cost to have someone else manage the logistics for this type of data—the contracts to get the data, the normalization and loading of the data, and the high-availability provisioning of access. This way, libraries can continue to put our efforts into making our unique collections more accessible, delivering core services, and creating the best library experience for our users.
Because Primo Central fits into the Primo architecture as a Primo index segment, the blending of Primo Central results with local Primo results is straightforward and yields the same rapid response time as a local Primo implementation. Furthermore, in the soon-to-be-released Primo 3.0 system, a library will be able to use the Primo administration module to tweak the relevance-ranking algorithm so that the blending of local results with Primo Central results will match the library’s policy regarding the prominence of its materials in the result list. Of course, libraries will continue to have control over the exact search scope, the user interface, and the manner in which results are displayed (regardless of the results’ origin).
The creation of Primo Central has been a great experience for the development, implementation, and data services teams at Ex Libris. Many team members have worked together to obtain data from information providers, normalize the data, and map it for the Primo index structure; to develop blending and relevance-ranking mechanisms; and to build an environment that supports hundreds of millions of records and a very large number of Primo and MetaLib users while retaining the excellent response time and relevance ranking that characterize Primo. With the goal of maintaining a robust infrastructure, facilitating access from all over the world, and addressing peak periods of usage, Ex Libris is hosting Primo Central in a cloud computing environment.
And, indeed, so far so good: as libraries are beginning to work with Primo Central, we are witnessing a smooth transition to an extremely broad information landscape that is growing at a very rapid pace. Over 200 million records are currently being added to Primo Central as a result of agreements with information providers, and many more records are expected to be added within the next few months.
[1] E-mail communication from Corey Harper at NYU to the NGC4LIB listserv, October 10, 2009
[2] Figures presented at the Ex Libris user group meeting in Seoul on November 13, 2009
[4] A collaborative of 26 universities that aim to establish a repository where they can archive and share their digitized collections (http://www.hathitrust.org/)
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Aleph Receives a First from Oxford | Aleph Receives a First from Oxford | Robert Bley, Managing Director, Ex Libris UK
The Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford (previously known as Oxford University Library Services) recently expanded their suite of Ex Libris solutions by selecting the Aleph® integrated library system (ILS), replacing their GEAC Advance system. The Bodleian Libraries have worked in partnership with Ex Libris since 2007 and are running the Primo® discovery and delivery solution, the SFX® OpenURL link resolver, and the MetaLib® gateway and metasearch solution.
The efficient, sophisticated tools and workflow support provided by Aleph will enable the Bodleian Libraries to meet the rapidly changing needs of the university’s vast research community. Staff members will make full use of Aleph’s built-in tools to configure the system to support Oxford’s complex library organization, policies, and workflows. The flexibility to build a library system that corresponds to the university’s unique needs proved a major factor in its selection of Aleph.
“Following our research into a new ILS for the Bodleian Libraries, we concluded that only Aleph could deliver the robust functionality that we required, in conjunction with the sophistication to deal with the devolved federal structure of our collegiate library system,” Dr. Sarah Thomas, Bodley’s Librarian, explained. “The proven ability of Ex Libris to deliver large projects on schedule and on budget was a further decisive factor for us. Having worked closely with Ex Libris for several years, we felt that our vision for the future is aligned with the Company’s long-term strategy,” Dr. Thomas added.
The Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford form the largest university library system in the United Kingdom. They include the principal university library—the Bodleian Library—which has been a library of legal deposit for 400 years; major research libraries; and libraries attached to faculties, departments, and other institutions of the university. The combined library collections number more than 11 million printed items, in addition to 30,000 e-journals and vast quantities of materials in other formats.
The Bodleian Libraries plan to fully integrate Aleph with Primo to deliver seamless access to the libraries’ extensive collections. The SOLO (Search Oxford Libraries Online) one-stop search and delivery solution, powered by Primo, went live at Oxford in 2008 and has paved the way for exciting new projects such as the implementation of Aleph across the university’s many libraries. With this online integrated search service, users can access the library’s major information resources, regardless of type, format, or location, and receive enriched results quickly.
Dr. Thomas attributes SOLO’s success with library staff and end users to the sophisticated search technology and ease of use of Primo: “The Bodleian Libraries have vast and complex collections of e-resources and printed material. Thanks to Primo, SOLO brings all our collections together at the user’s fingertips and offers a completely new approach to browsing our resources. It is a powerful tool which makes our collections even more accessible to users worldwide.”
Richard Ovenden, Keeper of Special Collections and Associate Director, Bodleian Library (left), with Robert Bley of Ex Libris |
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Ex Libris Support Sails to the Rescue and Saves the Day | Ex Libris Support Sails to the Rescue and Saves the Day | Michael Kaplan, Director of Marketing, Ex Libris North America
Saint Peter’s College (SPC), located on twin campuses in Jersey City and Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey (in the United States), is a relatively small college, with approximately 3,000 full-time and part-time students from across the United States and 60 other countries. Founded in 1872, SPC is a Jesuit, Catholic, liberal arts college whose goal is to “develop the whole person in preparation for a lifetime of learning, leadership, and service in a diverse and global society.”
When David Orenstein arrived as the new director in July 2009, he encountered “challenges and issues in all areas of the library, including operation of the Voyager® ILS.” In a story that is typical for small institutions with limited resources, many valuable features and functions in Voyager remained unused by the small team of librarians. Dr. Orenstein and the library staff compiled a list of essential actions points for Voyager. The college’s highly skilled library-systems and electronic-resources librarian—thrilled to have a mandate for change—began implementing many of the action points.
But fate intervened in the form of a disastrous server failure. At the first sign of trouble, library staff quickly determined that the best course of action was to turn to Ex Libris. Dr. Orenstein and Ex Libris sales staff had already discussed a migration from a local server to a hosted environment. As soon as Ex Libris was notified of the problem, the Company’s support staff took over the entire project and moved SPC “from crashed to hosted and live in two days,” described Dr Orenstein.
The team leader of technical hosting services in the Ex Libris Chicago office reflected on the rescue: “SPC was planning to begin a migration to Remote IT Services (RITS) (hosted, or managed, services) for Voyager sometime in the near future. But before the migration schedule was confirmed, the library had a hardware failure on their self-hosted Voyager server. Immediately the sales and support teams jumped into action.
“A customer support analyst on the Voyager team fielded the failed system, quickly extracted the database, and copied it to a hosted server,” continued the hosting-services team leader. “At this point, the goal was simply to build a robust backup for the customer. Hosting-services personnel then took over from the support team and began migrating the system immediately to RITS. Less than eight hours had elapsed from the time of SPC’s initial support call to the time the system was live in the RITS environment. Everyone involved acted with precision and speed, which led to a very successful and fast migration.”
“I can sleep soundly at night now that the server is hosted,” Dr. Orenstein commented. “The system is well managed, and we at St. Peter’s College library no longer have to invest time in the server. Upgrades and backups are managed by Ex Libris, and our staff members can focus their resources on delivering fantastic library service to our users.”
Dr. Orenstein recalls that “most of our users were unaware of the crash and how the system had been restored. Faculty members who knew of the problem were extremely pleased that it was resolved so quickly.”
A grateful Dr. Orenstein concludes: “Ex Libris and the wonderful support and managed-care teams were truly our “first responders.” We couldn’t be more satisfied with the hugely successful outcome of a hosted Voyager environment. Ex Libris has our firm loyalty. We got where we wanted to go—and to think we saved months of planning time in the process!”
Saint Peter's College, Jersey City campus
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Simply Smooth SFX at the University of East London | Simply Smooth SFX at the University of East London | Timm-Martin Siewert, Sales Consultant - Pre-Sales Europe
In just six months during 2009, the University of East London (UEL) implemented five Ex Libris solutions and migrated from the Serials Solutions 360 link resolver to the Ex Libris SFX® OpenURL link resolver. The implementation was a huge success, with SFX and a full suite of Ex Libris solutions integrated into the university’s own systems on schedule and within budget. In addition, with the university’s acquisition of the Primo® discovery and delivery solution, the Aleph® integrated library system, and the Ex Libris e-product suite—SFX, the MetaLib® gateway and metasearch portal, and the Verde® e-resource management system—in February 2009, UEL earned the honor of becoming the hundredth Ex Libris UK customer.
In their quest for a new link resolver, UEL had three fundamental requirements: ease of use of library staff, a comprehensive knowledgebase and the ability to integrate with their existing library systems. In all these areas, UEL considered that SFX best met their requirements. At the center of SFX lies the KnowledgeBase. UEL were pleased by the speed with which library staff were able to populate all their resources, and the way in which SFX automatically updated the library’s holdings. The administrative interface of the system proved very accessible for staff members—both during the implementation phase, and now that the system is live. Finally, smooth integration with MetaLib, Verde and Primo ensured that the library can efficiently control the discoverability and management of its electronic resources.
During the migration from the university’s former Serials Solutions link resolver, staff members at UEL were delighted by the smooth transition and welcomed the ease of use that SFX provides. Gurdish Sandhu, associate director of systems at the university, declared the implementation project an overwhelming success: “The implementation of SFX, together with all the Ex Libris solutions we selected, has been extremely easy. We are impressed by the comprehensive nature of the SFX KnowledgeBase and are pleased with the support that the Advanced Collection Tool and the Statistics module provide for collection management,” Ms. Sandhu commented. “We feel that our vision and future library strategy mesh with the Ex Libris corporate strategy,” she added.
When the university embarked on its search for new library automation systems, funding was made conditional on the completion of the implementation by the summer of 2009, meaning that Primo, Aleph, MetaLib, and SFX had to be implemented within six months. Ex Libris staff worked closely and productively with UEL librarians and the information technology department to realize this goal efficiently and on schedule. Both SFX and MetaLib were successfully integrated with Primo in time for the launch of Primo at the end of July 2009.
SFX is the most popular link resolver available, used in over 1,800 libraries worldwide. SFX provides users with context-sensitive links to the full text of articles and to other library-defined resources, including local holdings in the online public access catalog (OPAC), preferred document-delivery suppliers, related Web-based resources and services, local information repositories, and many other services. The SFX KnowledgeBase is one of the industry's largest and most inclusive, containing information about e-journals, e-books, packages, and platforms that are available in the scholarly environment.
To further enhance the benefits of SFX to its user community, the University of East London subsequently subscribed to the bX scholarly recommender service—the first service to provide article-level recommendations focused on the scholarly domain. bX reflects the choices of researchers from institutions around the world, based on an analysis of over a hundred million usage logs—and growing rapidly every day. Launched in May last year, bX is already used in use at over 200 institutions.
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URM Development Partners’ Meeting: The Sharing of Chocolate, Beer, and Ideas in Belgium | URM Development Partners’ Meeting: The Sharing of Chocolate, Beer, and Ideas in Belgium |
Kathryn Harnish, Director of URM Product Management
In early December 2009, Ex Libris staff gathered with the four Unified Resource Management (URM) development partners in Leuven, Belgium, for the third face-to-face review meeting. Joining the Ex Libris URM team and members of the Catholic University Leuven (K.U. Leuven) library, which hosted the gathering, were representatives from Boston College, Princeton University, and Purdue University. The major topics at this meeting were selection, acquisition, and fulfillment. Thanks to the wonderful facilities at K.U. Leuven, the group took advantage of videoconference technology to bring staff members back home into the discussion—even though time differences meant early mornings for many remote participants!
The week of meetings began with two days dedicated to a design review of selection and acquisition, led by Ex Libris analyst Dan Sweeney. Following up on the discussion at the June kick-off meeting and numerous conference calls in the interim, Dan presented end-to-end workflows for various business processes and demonstrated how the URM framework will address these processes. Because one of the goals of the URM team is to automate processes that don’t require operator intervention, many of Dan’s descriptions of the selection and acquisition workflows focused on system-level activity. Of course, URM provides options for manual processes where necessary, and Dan reviewed initial mock-ups of the user interfaces designed to support such activities.
According to Katharine Farrell, from Princeton University, “The design review meeting showed how carefully the designers are listening to the partners and focus group participants. The concept of task lists for selection and acquisitions activities in URM is a new approach to targeting work that needs to be done to particular staff roles. It offers a more precise way for the right staff to deal with tasks that require human intervention, while allowing automated handling of routine functions.”
The last two days of the gathering were devoted to an initial solution review for fulfillment, including the functionality required to support the circulation of physical resources and the delivery of electronic and local digital assets. John Larson, Yochai Melamed, and Moshe Shechter, members of the Ex Libris URM team, reviewed the business needs for fulfillment and proposed several solutions: fulfillment “workbenches” designed to provide seamless navigation and workflows for loan and return processes; patron management tools, including interoperability with registration and student information systems; and course reading functionality and its relationship to CMS or VLE systems; and more.
For Bob Gerrity of Boston College, “a key benefit of the URM development partnership is the face-to-face meetings to review, discuss, and provide feedback on the URM solution and design proposals. I was particularly pleased to see the idea of ‘Smart Fulfillment’ take shape, with a clear vision of delivering resources and services to users in a more streamlined and transparent manner. The proposed design for managing policies was also refreshing, and a major improvement over how policies are managed in our current ILS.”
Ex Libris extends a special thanks to Jo Rademakers and the entire URM team at K.U. Leuven for their tremendous hospitality over the week. The extensive supplies of Belgian chocolate, the terrific facilities, and the great camaraderie over local brews and dinner made everyone feel very welcome.
URM Development Partner representatives with the Ex Libris URM team
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The URM Metadata Management System: Bringing Library Catalogs to the Network | The URM Metadata Management System |
John Larson, Requirements Analyst, Ex Libris
The Ex Libris Unified Resource Management framework (URM™) provides libraries with a suite of the traditional functions necessary to streamline current management tasks across print, electronic, and digital resources. In addition, the framework is designed to support the transformational activities—for example, managing e-research, institutional repositories, and preservation—that are required to meet the changing needs of a library’s parent organization and user community. Offered primarily as a network service, the framework leverages the collective effort of its participating libraries in such areas as collection development, metadata management, and resource sharing. The URM framework embraces the Ex Libris open-platform strategy, which enables libraries to customize or extend functionality based on local requirements.
Within this framework, a metadata management system (MMS) addresses the need for high-quality metadata in a streamlined management environment. The system provides a centralized cataloging infrastructure that enables libraries to share the work of describing resources without limiting each library’s ability to manage its unique collections.
Institutional requirements for metadata management are changing. Libraries must connect users to an increasingly complex array of resources that are in a variety of formats and are stored in a variety of locations—locally and remotely, in digital repositories and in vendor databases. To manage this intricate web of resources, libraries need rich descriptive metadata more than ever. But in times of financial pressure, libraries have to maintain their high standard of metadata quality without the associated costs.
In the URM architecture, a library has a local inventory that describes the library’s collection. Inventory records store all the information needed to access an actual resource—be it physical or digital, local or remote—and are linked to descriptive metadata residing in the MMS. An advantage of this decoupling of the catalog and the inventory is that the items in the inventory record the distinct characteristics of the individual resources, while the MMS unifies the description of resources across many different collections.
The MMS merges centralized and local approaches to library cataloging. The system is divided into two parts: a community zone and a library zone.
The library zone is similar to a traditional catalog: it's composed of local catalogs over which individual institutions or consortia wish to maintain stewardship.
The community zone is a central repository of bibliographic and authority records. A community catalog contains bibliographic records that are accessed and managed by the whole community. Today, libraries across the world are describing and managing many of the same resources. If every library has the English version of War and Peace, for example, they’re all using the same basic version of a record to describe the item. Today’s cataloging environment requires each library to download and manage the record locally. With a community catalog, libraries can bring their catalogs out of their silos and onto the network. When one library enhances a record in the community catalog, all libraries linked to that record benefit immediately. Not only is the maintenance burden of local metadata management reduced, but the central records are improved by ongoing community enrichment.
The world of bibliographic description is becoming more complex, and libraries need a way to manage that complexity without sacrificing quality. The MMS supports shared bibliographic description and is tightly integrated with system processes and staff workflows. By sharing the workload, libraries can balance the reduction of costs with the need to continue providing rich descriptive metadata that binds increasingly varied collections.
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Expert to Expert: Talking About Library Solutions | Expert to Expert: Talking About Library Solutions | Daniela Wittig, Marketing Manager, Ex Libris Germany
In October 2009 the library of the University of Amsterdam hosted the Ex Libris Solutions Day, where Ex Libris customers discussed their experiences with Ex Libris solutions.
After Mr Nol Verhagen, director of the University of Amsterdam library had welcomed the 65 attendees, Mr. Matthias Hemmje, Professor for Computer Science and Chair of Multimedia and Internet Applications at the University of Hagen, opened the day. His keynote presentation, “Open-Source vs. Standard Software—Impacts on Library Infrastructures,” offered a broad overview of issues that need to be systematically analyzed—for example, which functionalities are provided by open-source solutions and which have yet to be developed, and the time line for future development. He concluded that the total cost of ownership (TCO) was a major factor influencing many institutions’ decisions as to whether to choose proprietary or open-source software.
The University of Amsterdam went live with Aleph some weeks ahead of Solution Day. Following an extensive evaluation process, the university selected Aleph to replace the library’s LBS system. Mr. Marc van den Berg, the head of electronic services at the University Library of Amsterdam, gave an engaging report about the library’s data migration project, which was successfully completed on schedule.
Mr. Axel Kaschte, strategy officer for Europe at Ex Libris, talked about the Company’s initiative to design a new-generation management system for back-office library operations—selection, acquisition, cataloging, management, and fulfillment—for the full spectrum of library materials, regardless of format or location. The Unified Resource Management (URM™) framework will provide libraries with a suite of the traditional functions necessary to streamline current management tasks across print, electronic, and digital resources.
Axel went on to present the Ex Libris open-platform strategy, the conceptual basis for an environment in which the open interfaces of Ex Libris systems are well defined, well documented, and readily available to the customer community, and in which collaboration is natural and easy to achieve. Fundamental to the open-platform strategy is the EL Commons collaborative Web site. EL Commons consists of a customer-led wiki and the CodeShare site, to which customers contribute code extensions to enhance the functionality of Ex Libris solutions.
In the fourth presentation, Ms. Mandy Stewart, resource discovery research and projects manager at the British Library, focused on the implementation of the Primo® discovery and delivery solution at the British Library and the leading role that the library is taking in the Web 2.0 world. Mandy explained why the British Library chose Primo, focusing on the product’s rich out-of-the-box functionality, its scalability, its openness, and its single point of discovery. She went on to describe how Primo meshes with the British Library’s strategy to provide an accessible focal point for research and scholarly activity for the population of the United Kingdom.
Yves Maurer and Carlo Blum from the information technology department of the National Library of Luxembourg presented eluxemburgensia, the newspaper archive at the National Library of Luxemburg. Powered by the DigiTool® digital asset management system, the National Library of Luxembourg has made 150 years of the nation’s newspapers available online (www.eluxemburgensia.lu). The newspaper archive contains over 800,000 historical news reports and analyses, articles, advertisements, pictures, and obituaries from 100,000 newspaper pages, and includes items in the country’s three official languages, French, German, and Luxembourgish. The National Library of Luxembourg plans to digitize its entire printed archive of over six million documents in the coming years.
Jo Rademakers, the head of library automation at the Catholic University of Leuven/LIBIS (K.U. Leuven, in Belgium), gave the closing talk of the day. He discussed the benefits of participating in a large Aleph consortium and the experience of hosting a major library network that covers an entire country. K.U. Leuven is the host institution of the LIBIS library network, which consists of 30 independent member organizations (universities, colleges, national and regional parliaments, and a network of public libraries).
Together these fascinating customer presentations provided a thought-provoking and enjoyable glimpse at a variety of live Ex Libris solutions.
Dr Axel Kaschte, Ex Libris Strategy Director for Europe, talks at the Solutions Day |
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The Ex Libris Learning Center—Always There for You | The Ex Libris Learning Center—Always There for You |
Sam Kamin, Corporate Training Manger, Ex Libris
The Ex Libris Corporate Training Services team has been working hard over the last few months to launch the new Learning Center. The Learning Center provides customers with round-the-clock access to a wide range of lessons on different aspects of the Ex Libris product suite, augmenting onsite or Web-based training that customer organizations receive upon implementing a new Ex Libris solution.
The types of lessons available include the following and more:
- Initial training for libraries with a new installation
- Refresher courses and more advanced training for staff members that have already had initial training
- “How to” lessons, which focus on a specific topic or advanced feature
- “What’s new?” lessons, which deal with service packs and new version features
- General training that provides an overview of a product’s purposes and capabilities. These courses generally are less technical in nature.
The Learning Center is online 24/7 with an ever-growing repository of interactive lessons. A subscription to the Learning Center will enable your institution to access the knowledge that will turn your novice users into experts who will know how to maximize the capabilities of your Ex Libris solutions.
The Learning Center is based on the popular Moodle learning management system, familiar to millions of users worldwide.
To find out more and to register for the Learning Center, visit http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/category/LearningCenter or contact learn@exlibrisgroup.com.
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From Marconi to Ex Libris: Innovation in Communication Technology | From Marconi to Ex Libris: Innovation in Communication Technology |
Laura Salmi, Administration Manager & Sales and Marketing Support, Ex Libris Italy
One hundred and fifteen years ago, in a little village in the Italian province of Bologna, an amazing discovery came to light that would radically change the way people communicate. The physicist and inventor Guglielmo Marconi, testing the transmission of radio waves emitted from the hilltop near that little village, sowed the seed of a revolution in information technology, a revolution that quickly picked up speed, reaching out to more and more people and covering increasingly greater distances. Since that day, radio has become a symbol and tool of freedom: the freedom to find information, use it, and share it—anywhere on the globe.
After many years, in the same village near Bologna, now named Sasso Marconi in honor of its extraordinary citizen, and during the centennial of Marconi’s Nobel Prize for physics, the Italian office of Ex Libris opened its doors. Like Guglielmo Marconi, Ex Libris possesses the skills to envision and imagine technology that doesn’t yet exist, to create the foundations for new solutions that harness the power of aggregation, and to share ideas and data. Ex Libris has repeated demonstrated how it can translate these capabilities into applications that have made the Company a world leader in the library automation industry.
The most notable examples are SFX®, the first OpenURL link resolver; Primo®, the revolutionary discovery and delivery system; bXTM —the first and only scholarly article recommender service; and the Rosetta digital preservation system, which is the first end-to-end solution for the management and preservation of digital collections.
Other projects currently on the drawing board of Ex Libris visionaries and developers have the potential to completely redesign library services and build the future management system for back-office library operations, while maintaining their ongoing purpose of making information available and enabling the advancement of human knowledge. Guglielmo Marconi would be proud to know that such a pioneering company has chosen to open its Italian office in the village that many years ago witnessed his amazing discovery.
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A Guest for the Holiday Season | A Guest for the Holiday Season | Mirko Thiessen, Aleph Customer Support, Ex Libris Germany
During the week of December 13, 2009, I enjoyed the hospitality of the Aleph® support team at Ex Libris headquarters in Jerusalem. As a member of the European Aleph support team based in Hamburg, it was a great delight to visit Israel, and put faces to the names of people with whom I’ve been working so closely for the past eight years.
During my visit, the Aleph support team held several interdepartmental meetings, which provided a terrific opportunity for me to exchange ideas with support and development staff. Among the topics discussed were the translation and localization of Aleph version 20.1, the repackaging of the Aleph GUI to enable libraries to implement customizations for all users, and the processing of support incidents.
By a happy coincidence, my visit coincided with the winter festival of Hanukkah, and I participated in a surprising number of holiday celebrations both in the office and around the country. I found time to explore Jerusalem’s Old City, as well as the Herodium Fortress in the Judean Desert, and other tourist attractions. My visit was a wonderful learning experience and extremely enjoyable. I’m looking forward to the next time!
Mirko Thiessen and Yoel Kortick, Aleph 500 support team leader, take a break from the week’s intensive meetings to visit the Old City of Jerusalem. |
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2009 IGeLU Conference: A Local Organizer’s Point of View | 2009 IGeLU Conference: A Local Organizer’s Point of View |
Jukka Pennanen, Coordinator of the 2009 IGeLU Conference in Finland
This year, the annual IGeLU conference took place in Helsinki, Finland, at the Grand Marina Congress Center. For an inexperienced conference planner, it was very exciting to organize such a big event—one that brings together hundreds of library professionals and technical experts and that had been so successful in previous years, when it was held in Stockholm, Brno, and Madrid. At the outset, the Helsinki organizing committee set a high target for the number for attendees; ultimately, over 450 people participated, making this conference the largest so far, with representatives from Japan and Brazil attending for the first time.
As the local organizers, we wanted to provide information about the content of the program early on to facilitate decision-making about participation in the conference. The steering committee worked hard to achieve this goal, and I must say that Michele Newberry and other committee members did a great job in preparing the whole program in a timely fashion. My gratitude also goes to all the library staffers who were actively involved in producing important content for a wide range of sessions and to Ex Libris and our sponsoring partners, whose contribution was truly valuable in making this conference possible.
It has become a tradition for the steering committee and working groups to hold preconference meetings on the weekend prior to the conference. During the conference itself, participants enjoyed social events every evening, including a visit to a spa and a reception at city hall.
There was a lot of fun with technical things, too. For the first time in IGeLU history, we had an opportunity to organize a video seminar, which was given by California State University’s Dave Walker. I dare say that it worked perfectly—though Dave had to wake up at five o’clock in the morning to give his presentation! We happily set up a forum—IGeLU2009—and the IGeLU Wall for open comments; during the conference, 892 comments were posted on the Wall through Twitter (http://twapperkeeper.com/igelu09/?limit=all). Combining Web 2.0 tools with a real-life meeting in an efficient way is a hot topic right now, and I venture to hope that these tools will find their way to future IGeLU conferences. We also enjoyed learning how to push program data and updated information simultaneously to the Internet and to the screens in the conference foyers in a continuous manner.
In addition, participants were pleased to have the opportunity to choose the name for the new enhancement-request system (whose working title was NERS). The system is now called CORE (Cooperation Oriented to Resources Enhancements).
The organizing committee was thrilled to receive participants’ positive feedback about the conference. Although my responsibilities on the organizing side limited my opportunities to listen to presentations carefully, it was a pleasure to read comments that the presentations were “interesting and informative.”
IGeLU is not only a vast community, but it is also an integrated, well-organized network with a large number of active, talented members who work tirelessly for our shared objectives. The annual IGeLU conferences are a powerful manifestation of the significance and value of community energy.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank the members of the organizing committee for the extremely valuable work they do. I would also like to express my appreciation to the people who helped make the local arrangements for the 4th IGeLU conference and guaranteed its success (there are too many to list all the names!), and in particular the Helsinki steering committee.
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Bean Town Welcomes the ALA 2010 Midwinter Meeting | Bean Town Welcomes the ALA 2010 Midwinter Meeting |
Loralynne Evans, Event Manager, Ex Libris North America
More than 8,500 attendees and 2,500 exhibitors braved the snow and freezing temperatures to attend the ALA 2010 Midwinter Meeting at the new Boston Convention and Exhibition Center in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 15-18, 2010.
During the conference, there was a buzz in the air about the new Primo Central and bX solutions, and about the Primo 3.0 enhancements that enable users to perform a number of library activities in the newly redesigned Primo interface. The four demo stations in the Ex Libris booth were constantly busy with attendees checking out these systems.
To commemorate Boston’s history with tea, Ex Libris handed out tea bags at the booth. Ex Libris lapel pins, another booth giveaway, were a big hit, and attendees were seen wearing them proudly in the conference halls.
Ex Libris proudly hosted three seminars given by customers and Ex Libris product managers during the conference. Participants were invited to enjoy a cup of tea while attending the seminars.
At the first seminar, “Info on Demand: Broaden Your Primo Experience with the Primo Central Article Repository,” a panel of experts presented fascinating insights into the Primo Central mega-aggregate of scholarly e-content, a new Primo component that Ex Libris provides as a service in a cloud computing environment. The panel consisted of the University of Notre Dame’s Mark Dehmlow and Pascal Calarco; Terry Hulbert, of the American Institute of Physics; and Gilad Gal, Ex Libris Primo product manager.
“Benefit from Users' Collective Wisdom: the bX Scholarly Recommender Service” was presented by David Walker, from the California State University, and Nettie Lagace, Ex Libris bX product manager, who took participants through the first year of bX. Just nine months after its launch, this successful recommender service is now in use at more than 200 institutions, providing researchers with article-level recommendations based on an analysis of over a hundred million usage logs—and more every day.
The third seminar, “A Brave New World for Collection Development: New Workflows for the Next-Generation Environment,” explored the Ex Libris next-generation library framework. David Swords (of Blackwell Book Services), Ted Schwitzner (from Illinois State University), and Kathryn Harnish (Ex Libris director of URM product management) provided a valuable opportunity for participants to discover, and delve more deeply into, some of the emerging features of the Unified Resource Management (URMTM) framework.
Ex Libris would like to extend a big thank you to all our guest presenters. We greatly appreciate your contribution! Recordings of the seminars will be available from mid-February on the Ex Libris Web site, at www.exlibrisgroup.com/Category/Webinars.
Mark your calendar! The ALA 2010 Annual Conference will be held in Washington DC on June 25-28, 2010. We will post information about the Ex Libris booth and conference seminars on our Web site in April. For additional information or questions about Ex Libris participation at the ALA Midwinter Meeting or ALA Annual conference, please contact conferences@exlibrisgroup.com.
We look forward to seeing you in Washington DC!
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Grab Your Hat, and Attend the Ex Libris 2010 Technical Seminar and ELUNA Conference | Grab Your Hat, and Attend the Technical Seminar and ELUNA Conference | Loralynne Evans, Event Manager, Ex Libris North America
Join us in Fort Worth, Texas, for the Ex Libris Technical Seminar on May 9-10, 2010, and the ELUNA conference on May 11-13, 2010.
The Technical Seminar is a comprehensive training program for librarians, including systems librarians, and developers who work with Ex Libris products. Taught by Ex Libris product experts and developers, the seminar will provide extensive hands-on training, training for new certification, and sessions for advanced users.
The three-day ELUNA conference will include more than 70 breakout sessions, an Ex Libris company update, product news, a strategic direction presentation by Oren Beit-Arie—Ex Libris chief strategy officer—and a cocktail reception featuring posters created by Ex Libris product users.
The combined seminar and conference reception on the evening of Monday, May 10, will highlight Texas hospitality with music, drinks, and hors d'oeuvres. The reception is sponsored by Ex Libris and is included in the registration for the Ex Libris Technical Seminar and the ELUNA conference. Enjoy this opportunity to reconnect with colleagues and Ex Libris staff.
Why Should You Attend?
- Increase your knowledge of Ex Libris systems
- Learn from Ex Libris experts and fellow users
- Optimize your products for the benefit of your end users
- Network with colleagues and Ex Libris staff
Registration for the Technical Seminar and ELUNA conference will open in March. More information is available about the ELUNA conference at http://eluna2010.tcu.edu/default.htm.
Saddle up, and prepare to join us in Fort Worth, Texas!
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