We are very happy to announce today the introduction of a new Primo component, Primo Central. Primo Central indexes scholarly materials such as articles and e-books provided by publishers and aggregators, and is seamlessly integrated into local Primo systems. Primo Central will be managed by Ex Libris as a service available to all Primo customers.
Primo is designed from the outset as a tool for libraries and librarians, focusing on the uniqueness of each library and the particular way that libraries make information discovery work for their communities of users. To support the needs of hundreds of different libraries and the varying ways in which information providers enable their data, Primo offers a range of search technologies including ‘native’ search of local and remote Primo indexes and metasearch of licensed resources. Primo Central complements the Primo searching capabilities by enabling a library to offer fast, effective, and seamless access to the entire library offering. With Primo Central, users will be able to transparently search in locally-managed collections and global e-content with the search results blended into a single relevance-ranked list. Primo enables libraries to leverage the power of the network and the community through this inclusion of shared content, while maintaining the freedom to achieve superior results for their users in the way best for them–all of this with little, if any, effort by the library.
E-content in Primo Central can be configured locally to determine the search scope, restricting this to subscribed resources only, or broadening this to extend beyond the library’s collection, particularly where pay-per-view options may enable users to reach the requested material. Similarly, search results can be filtered to show only those results for which full-text is available to the user. Real-time availability is ‘built-in’.
Ex Libris will be working with library partners on the ongoing development of Primo Central which will be in beta release at the end of 2009. For those of you attending the upcoming ALA Conference in Chicago, don’t forget to attend the Primo presentation or see a preview of Primo Central at the Ex Libris booth #1015.
To find out more about Primo Central, visit the Ex Libris Website.
