Yokohama, Japan — June 17, 2021
The institute will support the Japan Alliance of University Library Consortia for E-Resources with the Alma platform as a centralized electronic resource management service
For the Japanese version of this press release, please click here.
Yokohama, Japan—June 17, 2021. Ex Libris, a ProQuest company, is pleased to announce that the Ex Libris Alma® library services platform has been selected by the National Institute of Informatics (NII) in Japan, an interuniversity institute that promotes research in information-related areas. The decision was based on strategies defined in the 2019 Vision on Future Scholarly Information Systems, prepared by Japan’s Future Scholarly Information Systems Committee under the auspices of the Council for Promoting Collaboration between University Libraries and the National Institute of Informatics.
The adoption of the Alma service is critical to our mission to drive a digital transformation at all the academic libraries in Japan by building essential research and education information infrastructures.
The adoption of the Alma platform is part of an effort to create a new library system and network that includes support for digitized academic materials (such as electronic journals and electronic books) and the current library systems at Japan’s universities. With the Ex Libris Alma platform in place, NII will be supporting the Japan Alliance of University Library Consortia for E-Resources (JUSTICE) with an electronic resource management service. As a result, JUSTICE will be able to easily share publishers’ and academic societies’ title lists and e-resource license terms with consortial member libraries. More important, NII’s move to Alma services will connect the library systems of consortium members, enabling students, researchers, and librarians to find holdings of electronic resources at other universities. Because the Alma system is a library service platform (LSP), it can connect individual Alma users with the NII JUSTICE Alma implementation to manage all the print, electronic, and digital resources. The JUSTICE electronic resource management service is scheduled to go live in the second quarter of 2022.
The implementation is part of NII’s next NACSIS-CAT/ILL catalog information service, which will be provided through Kinokuniya Co., Ltd., as a contractor. For more information, see the NII press release and the Kinokuniya press release.
Professor Kento Aida, of the Information Systems Architecture Science Research Division at NII and manager of this project, said, “Working with Ex Libris will be the first step in getting ready for the libraries of the future. The adoption of the Alma service is critical to our mission to drive a digital transformation at all the academic libraries in Japan by building essential research and education information infrastructures.”
Oded Scharfstein, president of Ex Libris, added, “We are honored that the National Institute of Informatics has chosen the Ex Libris Alma platform to lead the way in developing informatics for the future of academia in Japan. This milestone will facilitate the switch to a unified library services platform for Japanese institutions of higher education, as NII continues to help academic libraries prepare for the future and move to the cloud.”
About the National Institute of Informatics
As Japan’s only general academic research institution seeking to create future value in the new discipline of informatics, the National Institute of Informatics (NII) seeks to advance integrated research and development activities in information-related fields, including networking, software, and content. These activities range from theoretical and methodological work through applications. As an interuniversity research institute, NII promotes the creation of a state-of-the-art academic-information infrastructure (the Cyber Science Infrastructure, or CSI), which is essential to research and education within the broader academic community, focusing on partnerships and other joint efforts with universities and research institutions throughout Japan, as well as industries and civilian organizations.
In parallel, NII develops and operates services of the essential academic information infrastructures used by the entire academic research community in Japan for research and education; it builds and operates the Science Information NETwork (SINET5), on one hand, and provides academic content and service platforms, on the other. The bilateral feedback cycle between the findings gained from the service operations and from the academic research generates cutting-edge technologies, which are utilized in the service. For more information, see https://www.nii.ac.jp/en/.
For information about the Future Scholarly Information Systems Committee, formed under the Council for Promoting Collaboration between University Libraries and the National Institute of Informatics, see https://contents.nii.ac.jp/korekara/). For information about the Council for Promoting Collaboration between University Libraries and the National Institute of Informatics, see https://contents.nii.ac.jp/cpc/. For information about the Japan Alliance of University Library Consortia for E-Resources (JUSTICE), created under the Council for Promoting Collaboration between University Libraries and the National Institute of Informatics, see https://www.nii.ac.jp/content/justice_en/.
About Ex Libris
Ex Libris, a ProQuest company, is a leading global provider of cloud-based SaaS solutions that enable institutions and their individual users to create, manage, and share knowledge. In close collaboration with its customers and the broader community, Ex Libris develops creative solutions that increase library productivity, maximize the impact of research activities, enhance teaching and learning, and drive student mobile engagement. Ex Libris serves over 7,500 customers in 90 countries. For more information, see our website and join us on LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.
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