ELympics—the Ex Libris Open-Platform Competition

Ex Libris launches an international competition to reward the best, most original code extensions from the customer community

Jerusalem, Israel - 9 November, 2009. Ex Libris® Group is pleased to announce the launch of ELympics, the Ex Libris open-platform competition. The Company will award prizes totaling $12,000 to the creators of the best code extensions to Ex Libris solutions during the competition period—November 9, 2009, to March 31, 2010. All members of the Ex Libris customer community are invited to submit their contributions via the CodeShare area (previously known as the Developer Zone) of the EL Commons collaborative Web site. The winners will be announced in May 2010.

The international panel of judges for the competition consists of Marshall Breeding, director for innovative technologies and research at Vanderbilt University (in the United States) and founding editor of the Library Technology Guides Web site; Sebastian Hammer, an open-source software developer who is the president and cofounder of IndexData, a company that specializes in information retrieval technologies; Dr. Andrew MacFarlane, senior lecturer in the Department of Information Science at City University (in London); and Yohanan Spruch, chief technology officer at Ex Libris.

“We are looking forward to seeing the innovative code extensions that our customer developers create during the competition,” commented Tamar Sadeh, director of marketing at Ex Libris and the coordinator of the open-platform program. “EL Commons, with its CodeShare area, is an extremely fertile environment for the library developers in our customer community, and the ELympics competition will stimulate original ideas to enhance Ex Libris solutions.”

Commenting on the recent upgrade of the entire EL Commons platform, Ms. Sadeh added: “EL Commons now provides even greater functionality and is more intuitive. With the rebranding of the Developer Zone as CodeShare, we are emphasizing its core role in facilitating the sharing of ideas and code extensions by members of the Ex Libris community. The benefits of the open-platform program accrue not only to active developers; all of our customers gain from the contributions of their peers.”

For details of the Ex Libris ELympics competition, see http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/category/ELympics.

About the Ex Libris Open-Platform Program
In May 2008, Ex Libris initiated the open-platform program to help institutions get the most out of their Ex Libris solutions. The program provides an environment in which the open interfaces of Ex Libris systems are well defined, well documented, and readily available to the customer community and in which collaboration is natural and easy to achieve, in particular through the EL Commons collaborative Web site.

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
Germany

Tel.: +49 40 89 809
Email: Daniela. Wittig@exlibrisgroup.com

This release was published on openPR.