March 21, 2016
Sixteen institutions in Montana seek to increase efficiency by reconceiving and unifying workflows
Chicago, IL—March 21, 2016. Ex Libris, a ProQuest company, is pleased to announce that Montana’s Treasure State Academic Information & Library Services (TRAILS) consortium has selected the Ex Libris Alma® resource management solution. The 16-member consortium of academic libraries decided to adopt Alma as a common, shared platform across the state following an earlier adoption of the Ex Libris Primo® discovery and delivery solution by the University of Montana, Montana State University, and the Outreach Montana: Networked Information (OMNI) group.
The TRAILS consortium sought a solution that would increase staff efficiency by unifying workflows and reorganizing resources to have the greatest impact. Further requirements were a native cloud-based system to help offset administration and energy costs, a discovery environment that would be flexible enough for large libraries to customize and powerful enough to provide excellent patron services out of the box, a rich analytics environment, and a vendor with a proven record of partnering with academic institutions. With the Alma resource management platform, the consortium will gain all of these features, offering member libraries benefits on many levels, thanks to the sharing of skills and resources.
“We chose Alma as the technological solution that will allow the sixteen academic libraries of TRAILS to build and manage collections more cooperatively,” commented Kenning Arlitsch, dean of the library at Montana State University. ”We expect this move will eventually bring greater access to information resources to students and faculty across Montana’s institutions of higher education”
”The implementation of the Alma library system is going to be an exciting process,” added Shali Zhang, professor and dean of libraries at the University of Montana. ”The new system will enable all participating libraries to work more efficiently, share expertise and resources, and provide better services to our user community—students, faculty, and staff—thus strengthening the library’s impact on learning and research initiatives. I am thrilled that in-depth collaboration between library colleagues at Montana’s academic campuses will soon be a reality.”
Eric Hines, president of Ex Libris North America, remarked: ”It is wonderful to see so many long-standing customers in Montana joining the Alma community. By providing seamless access to high-quality information resources, our resource management platform will be a key factor in helping Montana’s academic libraries meet their goal of supporting student success and faculty research. We look forward to many more years of successful partnership with Montana’s academic libraries.”
About Ex Libris
Ex Libris, a ProQuest company, is a leading global provider of cloud-based solutions for higher education. Offering SaaS solutions for the management and discovery of the full spectrum of library and scholarly materials, as well as mobile campus solutions driving student engagement and success, Ex Libris serves thousands of customers in 90 countries. For more information about Ex Libris, see our website, and join us on Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
About Treasure State Academic Information & Library Services (TRAILS)
The Treasure State Academic Information & Library Services (TRAILS) consortium is committed to a cooperative and efficient information technology project that supports student success and faculty research by providing seamless access to high-quality information resources. The Consortium was formed in 2016, with the goals of providing click-through access for students and faculty to all digital information resources purchased by any college or university in Montana, developing library collections cooperatively and negotiating with information resource vendors with one powerful voice, and utilizing cloud-based technologies for efficient support of teaching and research missions. For more information, visit https://guides.lib.montana.edu/TRAILS.
