(openPR) - Institutions around the world welcome the beta release of the Primo Central mega-aggregate of scholarly e-content

Jerusalem, Israel – January 14, 2010. Ex Libris® Group is pleased to announce the launch of Primo Central for beta testing at 14 partner institutions. When searching in their institution’s Primo interface, users in partner libraries will have seamless access to the Primo Central mega-aggregate of scholarly e-content.

Primo Central is a centralized index consisting of data harvested from primary and secondary publishers and aggregators. With Primo Central, users simultaneously search locally managed collections and global e-content and receive search results that are blended into a single relevance-ranked list. Libraries can tailor the relevance ranking to ensure appropriate emphasis on their local collections. Ex Libris provides Primo Central as a service, in a cloud computing environment.

Jody Combs, assistant dean for information technology at Vanderbilt University, a Primo Central library partner, commented: “Primo Central is a service we envisioned from the beginning of our development partnership for Primo. We are excited to see it moving from theory to practice. Not only will Primo Central draw attention to materials that some of our users were not aware of previously—thus improving return on our investment in e-collections—but it clearly indicates the origin of the materials for the benefit of those users who value specific scholarly collections. Using faceted categorization to select a particular collection, a researcher can narrow down the result list to show only items from that collection. The beauty is that the researcher can perform all these tasks from within the Primo interface.”

Nancy Dushkin, corporate vice president of discovery and delivery solutions at Ex Libris, noted: “Primo Central marks a dramatic change in the way we make the discovery of information resources available to the scholarly community. Researchers are able to access a vast wealth of e-content together with their local collections—and all with the same ease. We are looking forward to the general release of Primo Central, planned for mid-2010, and to seeing this service implemented at over 250 Primo sites around the world.”

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 serve the needs of libraries today and will facilitate their transition into the future. Ex Libris maintains an impressive customer base consisting of thousands of sites in more than 75 countries on six continents.

Dedicated to developing creative solutions in close collaboration with customers, Ex Libris enables libraries to maximize productivity and efficiency and, at the same time, greatly enhance 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 our Web site, visit our Initiatives and Commentary blogs, and follow our Twitter page.

Ex Libris (Deutschland) GmbH
Daniela Wittig
Gasstraße 18, Haus 2
22761 Hamburg
Deutschland