Welcome to the ninth issue of the Ex Librian newsletter. To introduce this issue, I’d like to focus on openness—openness of minds, perceptions, and software products.

Working in the international marketplace of libraries and information centers, Ex Libris considers open-mindedness and perceptiveness keys to success. Openness enables Ex Libris to adapt to regional, disciplinary, organizational, and cultural environments, on the one hand, and to the rapid changes in industry and technological trends, on the other. Being open-minded means that we welcome input; all our products are developed in collaboration with our customers. We are fortunate to have a close relationship with the customer community and to be able to work together with you to design and implement the systems that will lead us to the future.

Since its very beginning, Ex Libris has developed products that are open. All Ex Libris products can interoperate with each other and integrate with other systems in the institutional environment and beyond it. This interoperability is achieved through a reliance on open standards and interfacing protocols, when available. Indeed, we proudly witness the creative ways in which our customers have managed to take advantage of the products’ openness and tailor their environments to best suit their needs. We are also pleased to see the collaborative efforts across the Ex Libris community, whereby customers share their experience, their expertise, and even the code that they have written.

We are now in the process of taking our policy of openness one step further and establishing it as a strategic direction for the Company. We are setting up cross-product procedures to formalize the design, implementation, documentation, and publishing of our interfaces, and we are moving toward service-oriented architecture (SOA) principles for our future product designs. Furthermore, we have been working with the IGeLU and ELUNA user groups and a focus group of library staff developers to create a platform for user collaboration. This platform features a wiki, owned and managed by the user groups, which serves as a collective memory for the exchange of information and ideas among users and between users and the Ex Libris staff. The platform also includes the Developer Zone, through which Ex Libris publishes the interfacing channels to the Ex Libris products, such as Web services and X-services, in a structured and standardized way. In addition, in the Developer Zone, customers can upload and maintain software components that they have developed and that they would like to share with the community.

We see the Ex Libris products as a robust basis—developed and maintained by professionals and according to a long-term vision and road map—on which customers can build open-source components to maximize a product’s capabilities for their own environment. We believe that such a framework best serves the community and enables you to leverage both your expertise and ours. I look forward to seeing how the new platform evolves in the coming years.

Sincerely yours,

Matti Shem Tov, President and CEO, Ex Libris