October 9, 2007
With Primo, users around the world can search for and obtain library resources quickly and easily, anytime and anywhere.
Jerusalem, Israel—October 9, 2007. Ex Libris Group is pleased to announce that during August and September of 2007, five institutions—Vanderbilt University, the Royal Library of Denmark, the University of Minnesota, the University of Bridgeport, and the University of Iowa—went live with the Ex Libris Primo® discovery and delivery solution. Additional Primo sites will be going live throughout the year.
Vanderbilt University, a development partner with Ex Libris, recently began providing live access to Primo for both on-campus and off-campus users. Our initial implementation of Primo involves the content of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive in addition to the bibliographic and authority records derived from our integrated library system, commented Marshall Breeding, director for innovative technology and research for Vanderbilt University Libraries. This blend of unstructured and MARC-based content allows us to explore the capabilities of Primo to provide discovery and delivery services across diverse resources. Given the success we have seen with this limited set, we see great potential to build an even more powerful environment for our users as we incorporate other collections and content.
Jørgen Madsen, Primo project manager at the Royal Library of Denmark, cited the reasons for his librarys choice of Primo: First, we wanted a tool that would offer our users a one-stop search experience for our extremely diverse information resources, which the users had previously searched for in various systems. We wanted to give our users a place where they could find, in one go, materials that they didnt even know we had, including books, journals, articles, online collections, images, music scores, and digitized manuscripts.
Second, a search without access is futile. With Primo, we obtain full integration with all functionality required by a modern lending library: direct online access, a single sign-on system, and the ability of users to place hold requests, to see what they have borrowed, and to renew library materials.
Third, Madsen continued, Primo’s consortium features appealed greatly to us because of our close cooperation with other libraries. With Primo, we can form a true library consortium in which members can expose their collections to each other in a very clever way, creating a more coherent user experience.
University of Minnesota users, noted Christina Perkins Meyer, director of library enterprise operations at University of Minnesota Libraries, expect an intuitive search interface with sophisticated processing behind the scenes to make it easy for them access our rich information resources. Primo fulfills this purpose admirably, and we are very pleased to make it available to all of our users. During the coming months, we will give Primo even more prominence on our institutional Web sites and make it easy for users to embed it in their own work spaces.
Being a Primo development partner has been a great learning experience for us, and we are glad that our feedback, particularly the suggestions coming from testing in our state-of-the-art usability laboratory, has had a positive influence on the product early in its life cycle.
One of the important goals at the University of Bridgeport, explained Neil A. Salonen, University of Bridgeport president, is to create an information-literate student body. Our academic deans and librarians selected Primo, along with MetaLib® and SFX®, as an intuitive entry point for our learning community to discover scholarly content. The integrated search feature spans multiple database services, internal content repositories, and our online catalog. The modern Primo interface, with its social computing tools, concept grouping aids, and ability to customize help screens, appeals to our Internet savvy students.
Salonen added: While we selected Primo as a curriculum enabler, there are also sound business reasons for our decision. Foremost was working with an industry leader. Ex Libris provided the expert assistance we needed for our accelerated implementation. The Wahlstrom Library upgraded its Voyager catalog and simultaneously installed Primo, MetaLib, and SFX within a period of eight weeks. The technology promotes increased usage of expensive library databases and requires little IT support.
“The University of Iowa Libraries have announced the soft release of Smart Search—the universitys Primo installation, noted Paul A. Soderdahl, director of library information technology. The library had specific requirements for Smart Search, including an expectation that it would blend seamlessly with the librarys overall Web design. We were able to customize and extend the out-of-the-box Primo interface to meet our needs.
Smart Search gives our students and faculty access to the librarys holdings—which include 3.5 million records harvested from our ALEPH catalog, approximately 70,000 of which are Chinese, Japanese, and Korean records—and to over 20,000 digital library objects harvested from our CONTENTdm collections. All these records are accessible through a simple search box and a fast, intuitive user interface. Were planning to add more resources soon, including our local Web pages and other databases.
We are excited to see Primo systems going live just a few months after the product launch, commented Matti Shem Tov, president and CEO of Ex Libris Group. The close collaboration we enjoyed with our outstanding development partners helped us transform the Primo idea into a revolutionary product that addresses the real needs of our industry. Quickly becoming an integral part of the users research environment, Primo will continue to evolve, enabling institutions worldwide to expose their collections in the manner that todays library users have come to expect.
About Primo:
Primo is a unified solution for the discovery and delivery of library resources, regardless of format and location. Addressing the expectations of today’s library users for quick, easy, and effective searching and retrieval, Primo enables libraries to present their collections in an entirely new way, offering their users access to a wealth of authoritative information from a single point.
Incorporated in the Primo user experience are multiple elements adhering to Web 2.0 concepts, such as tags, ratings, and reviews that members of an institutions user community can share with each other or with communities in other institutions. Primo is the bridge that enables libraries to revolutionize the user experience as they move ahead with the evolution of their library infrastructure.
For additional information on Primo, see www.exlibrisgroup.com/primo.htm.
About Ex Libris
Ex Libris Group is a leading worldwide developer and provider of high-performance applications for libraries, information centres, and researchers, with installations around the globe. The Groups flagship ALEPH® 500 and Voyager® integrated library solutions are in use at over 3,000 sites worldwide. Other products from the Ex Libris suite, deployed at more than 1,300 sites, focus on the digital library and offer state-of-the-art, user-centric solutions for managing and providing informed access to electronic resources and digital assets.
