Following the OUs decision to choose Ex Libris Alma® and Primo® to provide unified resource management and discovery for their users, we spoke to Nicky Whitsed, Director of Library Services, about the reasons behind their decision:

“As The Open University Library’s collection consists largely of e-resources, we wanted to improve the user experience by ensuring easier access to online material. Together with enhancing our users’ discovery experience by offering a one-stop search interface via Primo, we were keen to improve the efficiency of library operations. Alma provides cross-collection workflows within a flexible system that easily integrates with other library and external systems used by The Open University.  The Ex Libris solutions that we have adopted will help the library support the OU’s strategic aims whilst enabling our institution to keep pace with changes in higher education.”

This suite of integrated products is tailored to meet the needs of both staff and library users, optimizing workflows, providing analytics which will enable evidence-based decision-making and presenting users with a single interface for the discovery and delivery of all library resources.

The Open University (UK) has also selected the bX® Recommender, a user-facing service that presents article recommendation. Based on the selections of millions of researchers around the globe, the bX Recommender helps users of the library to discover relevant literature that they would not necessarily have found otherwise.

If you would like to find out more about this project, please don’t hesitate to contact us.