February 23, 2009
Primo simplifies and streamlines search and discovery to meet the needs of TriUniversity Group’s web-savvy user community
Jerusalem, Israel – February 23, 2009.
Ex Libris™ Group is pleased to announce that the TriUniversity Group of Libraries (TUG) in Ontario, Canada, has gone live with a public beta version of the Primo® discovery and delivery solution. TUG is a consortium of three university libraries—the University of Guelph, the University of Waterloo, and Wilfrid Laurier University—and is a member of the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL) consortium and the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN).
Primo offers users a single point of discovery through which they can find and access all of an institution’s information resources—print, digital, and electronic. The solution’s Deep Search technology, a component of the Ex Libris strategic commitment to provide quality discovery for all research-library resources, enables library data from all sources to be seamlessly integrated.
Primo Deep Search functionality, which TUG will be using, enables Primo to display ranked result sets comprised of data retrieved from external repositories together with the library’s local data. The unified result set is ranked by relevance and displayed using faceted categorization. Tight integration with the external indexes that Primo leverages enables the solution to relate to the data contained within the external systems as if it was an intrinsic part of Primo. The result is that Primo end users experience instantaneous display of results with high-quality relevance ranking and a range of discovery-augmenting functionality such as user generated content, facets, e-shelf, and did you mean’.
”Primo provides an interface that will help us move toward our goal of meeting the needs of our Web-savvy users,” commented Allan Bell, associate university librarian at the University of Waterloo. ”It enables us to customize the interface, as well as to integrate new types of metadata and information resources that were not compatible with our existing OPAC and integrated library system. By consolidating discovery and delivery of local and remote formats—whether print, electronic, or digital—we will simplify and streamline search and discovery for our community. These new features will help us become more relevant in our users’ research and information-seeking universe.”
“We are extremely grateful for the commitment of Ex Libris staff in helping us with the implementation,” added Greg Sennema, electronic services librarian at Wilfrid Laurier University and the project manager for TUG’s Primo implementation team. “Their support and the close collaboration with our team have certainly paid off—as made clear by the comments we have received.” A graduate student, for example, provided the following feedback: “I am VERY impressed with Primo. It is far more functional in many ways. Search results in Trellis (our library catalogue) can be confusing, and Primo is a great improvement. I really like the idea of being able to tag and review books, to share information that way.”
Bell noted that the consortium is also beginning to work with its OCUL partners to integrate the electronic journal services of Scholars Portal into Primo, and to implement Primo Deep Search technology for full-text searching in the e-journal repository. ”The Ontario Scholars Portal electronic journal service contains 13 million articles from over 8,400 full-text journals and is currently being implemented with Mark Logic as the underlying infrastructure,” Bell explained. ”We are looking forward to working with Scholars Portal and Ex Libris to provide unified access to this critical information resource for our users.”
Carl Grant, president of Ex Libris North America, remarked, ”We are delighted that the TriUniversity Group has selected Primo to provide a single point of access to its extensive collections. Primo will enable students and researchers at the TUG universities to easily find the consortium’s valuable scholarly resources and make the most of them. We welcome the TUG libraries to the North American Primo customer base and look forward to working in close collaboration with the consortium.”
About the TriUniversity Group
The TriUniversity Group of Libraries provides a leading example of cooperation among the libraries of three Ontario universities: the Universities of Guelph and Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier University. Informal cooperation among the libraries of these three universities has been in place for nearly 30 years; however, in the past decade, rapidly advancing technology has increased the level of cooperation, resulting in a more formalized agreement to work together for mutual benefit.
For additional information on TUG, see https://www.tug-libraries.on.ca/
About Ex Libris
Ex Libris is a leading provider of automation solutions for academic, national, and research libraries. Offering the only comprehensive product suite for electronic, digital, and print materials, Ex Libris provides efficient, user-friendly products that not only serve the needs of libraries today but will also enable them to transition into the future. Ex Libris maintains an impressive customer base consisting of thousands of sites in more than 70 countries on six continents.
Dedicated to developing creative solutions in close collaboration with customers, Ex Libris enables libraries to maximize productivity and efficiency while greatly enhancing the user experience. By empowering users to discover and obtain the information they need, libraries ensure their position as the bridge to knowledge.
For additional information on Ex Libris Group, see https://exlibrisgroup.com/
