October 30, 2006
Consortium community will have access to more than three million e-journal articles
Zurich, Switzerland—October 30, 2006. Ex Libris™, a worldwide leading developer and provider of high-performance applications for libraries and information centers, announced today that the Consortium of Swiss Academic Libraries has chosen DigiTool®, the Ex Libris digital asset management solution, as the platform for the Consortiums E-Archiving project. The Swiss Consortium follows the Hochschulbibliothekszentrum (hbz) in Cologne and the Bavarian Library Network in Germany as the third German-language academic consortium to select DigiTool. The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich) library will operate the Swiss system.
The major factors in the Swiss Consortiums choice of the DigiTool solution were the flexibility with which it handles metadata and digital objects, an architecture that enables consortium members to work with a common repository, and Shibboleth support for user authentication.
With the local storage of content in the DigiTool repository, Swiss Consortium members will benefit from permanent access to the e-journal articles and associated metadata for which the Consortium has acquired archiving rights. The DigiTool authorization features will support the Consortiums varying institutional licensing models and will provide access to e-journal content on the basis of researchers institutional affiliation. Ultimately, DigiTool will store, administer, and make accessible more than three million e-journal articles.
DigiTool will allow us to make electronic information assets available to the scientific community of the Consortium over a long period of time, said Dr. Matthias Towe, the E-Archiving project manager. Other activities of the Consortium deal with the digitization of non-electronic content as well as the promotion of open access with the aim of making relevant Swiss content as freely available as possible. By taking these measures for long-term archiving, we are taking an important step toward reaching our goals.
About the Consortium:
The Consortium of Swiss Academic Libraries is a Swiss cooperative project of cantonal universities, ETH-related libraries, specialized faculties, the Swiss Landesbibliothek, and other partners. The central administrative authority is housed at the ETH library, which coordinates the Consortiums activities and is responsible for technical operations. The mission of the Consortiums E-Archiving module is to assure durable access to electronic resources, and to administer the long-term preservation of digital objects.
For further information, see https://lib.consortium.ch.
About Ex Libris:
Ex Libris is a leading worldwide developer and provider of high-performance applications for libraries and information centers, with installations in 63 countries. ALEPH® 500, the Ex Libris integrated library solution, has been installed at over 1700 sites worldwide. The MetaLib® gateway and metasearch system for library collections and SFX®, the context-sensitive linking solution for heterogeneous electronic resources in the scholarly information environment, have collectively been purchased by over 1000 institutions in 40 countries. The DigiTool solution for the construction of digital collections and the Verde® electronic resource management (ERM) system have been warmly adopted by customers worldwide.
Primo®, the newest addition to the Ex Libris product suite, is the companys next-generation, user-centric discovery and delivery solution.
