The Penn Libraries Select Ex Libris Alma for Unified Resource Management

 September 8, 2016

The Penn Libraries serve the world-class faculty and students of the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League institution. A founding member of the BorrowDirect resource-sharing partnership, the Penn Libraries is also active in the Blacklight Hydra and VIVO open source communities.

 ”Alma is a robust, proven alternative for managing research library workflows—arguably the most mature system on the market today,”said H. Carton Rogers III, vice provost and director of the Penn Libraries. ”Its technology will facilitate system-to-system integrations, helping us customize the user experience and enabling our IT practices to conform to our business processes rather than the other way around. With our transition to Alma, we will still be able to use the Summon^® index for federated article search as well as retain our own discovery innovations achieved with Franklin, our locally designed discovery solution.”

”As a cloud-based service, Alma will free us from maintaining a costly and staff-intensive computing infrastructure.” Rogers continued, ”Ex Libris will bear the responsibility of managing servers, software updates, and disaster recovery, thus enabling us to focus on service provision, feature improvements, and other IT priorities. We have been using Voyager for nearly twenty years, and the fact that Voyager and Alma share a common lineage through Ex Libris and earlier developers assures us of an easy migration. We look forward to continuing our fruitful, long-standing relationship with our partners at Ex Libris.”

Jane Burke, Ex Libris vice president of customer success, noted, ”All of us are thrilled that the Penn Libraries have opted for Alma. We shall be collaborating closely with them on integrating Alma with open-source discovery as well as on enhancing library workflows. The adoption of Alma by the Penn Libraries is proof once again of Alma’s standing as the library management system of choice for academic libraries.”

The Penn Libraries serve the world-class faculty and students of the University of Pennsylvania’s 12 schools. The Libraries’ collections comprise more than seven million volumes, nearly 200,000 journals, some three million digitized images, and extraordinary rare and unique materials that document the intellectual and cultural experience of ancient and modern civilizations. Through collaborative relationships, the Libraries supplement Penn’s great local collections with access to the Center for Research Libraries (approximately five million items), the combined holdings of all the Ivy League schools (more than 70 million volumes), and exclusive electronic access to some two million public domain titles in the HathiTrust collections. Today, the Libraries play a role in developing new technologies for information discovery and dissemination and are noted for contributions to digital library design. To learn more about the Penn Libraries, visit https://www.library.upenn.edu.

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.

Sara Leavens

Telephone: +1 215-746-1342