Library Technology Guides

It’s been about fifteen months since Innovative Interface made its initial announcement for Encore, its next generation library interface, or "discovery services platform" to use their terminology. The company has found a warm reception to this new product with over 50 libraries signing license agreements to date.

Nashville Public Library

In recent days, some of the Encore development partners have unveiled their work. You can now see Encore at Nashville Public Library, the Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale University, and Michigan State University Libraries.

Binghamton University Libraries, which uses the ALEPH automation system, and the University of Kentucky, a Voyager library, both allow access within their internal network, but not to the general public.

While none of these libraries have put Encore into production use as their default catalog, the public availability of Encore marks a major milestone in this new product.

Marshall Breeding Aug 5, 2007 18:47:19 Link to this thread    

I am conducting a survey on library automation trends. The survey aims to measure how well libraries are satisfied with thier automation systems and the companies or other organizations that support them. It also attempts to get some indication of whether libraries are looking favorably on open source software for their automation system.

I've created instructions on how to complete the survey.

I am hoping to get a very large response to this survey. I will publish the results of the study in an upcoming article, provided I get enough responses to ensure its validity.

Marshall Breeding Aug 9, 2007 09:55:29 Link to this thread    

I've gotten a number of reports where persons are not seeing the "Complete Automation Survey" botton when they get to the "details" page for thier library. The issue involves being logged into the site. If something happens to break your login session, the button doesn't show. If this happens to you, just log back into the site and you should then see the survey button. Please feel free to contact me if you have any difficulties.

Marshall Breeding Aug 14, 2007 10:07:43

I'm very glad that you are asking these questions, and I look forward to seeing the results. Thank you for undertaking this project.

Linda Culberson Aug 29, 2007 14:32:54

Primo, described by Ex Libris as its next generation "discovery and delivery tool" for academic libraries has been unveiled at the Vanderbilt University Libraries.

General Library Building
at Vanderbilt University

Ex Libris has been working with Vanderbilt for over a year as a development partner toward the creation of this new product which includes features such as faceted search, relevancy ranking of results, content enrichment services, grouping of related items through FRBR, and much more. Other development partners working on Primo with Ex Libris include the University of Minnesota and University Library Center of North-Rhine Westphalia.

At Vanderbilt, Primo works in conjunction with the library's Unicorn Library Management System, from which it receives the bibliographic records that represent the library's core collections. As an initial foray into expanding the scope of Primo to include other types of content and collections, the Library has also loaded data from the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, a major collection of U.S. national news broadcasts beginning in 1968.

During this review phase, Primo will be availble for review and comment, under the temporary name AlphaSearch. This event marks the first time that a live Primo implementation has been made available to the general public.

Marshall Breeding Aug 20, 2007 08:24:47 Link to this thread