The European Primo Community Expands Across Europe

European academic libraries join others in offering the Ex Libris discovery experience to their users

Jerusalem, Israel—May 2, 2012. Ex Libris® Group, a world leader in the provision of library automation solutions, is pleased to announce that numerous academic and research libraries in Europe have selected the Primo® discovery and delivery solution. In addition, several existing customers have supplemented their Primo offering with the Primo Central Index and the bX Recommender, while other institutions have expanded their successful Primo implementations.

New Primo sites include the following:
• University of Liège (Belgium)
• Interuniversity Library of Cujas (France)
• Fraunhofer Society (a research association with 60 affiliated institutes in Germany)
• University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany)
• University of Oldenburg (Germany)
• State Library of Oldenburg (Germany)
• Jade University of Applied Sciences (Germany)
• Anglia Ruskin University (UK)
• Buckinghamshire New University (UK)
• University of Bath (UK)
• University of Northampton (UK)

The Consortium of Icelandic Libraries, a Primo customer since 2009, recently added the Primo Central Index of scholarly electronic resources and the bX Recommender service to its Primo installation. Leipzig University and nine affiliated institutions, which use an open-source discovery system, have also adopted Primo Central and the bX Recommender.

In addition, as a result of their successful experience with Primo over the past three years, ETH-Bibliothek in Zurich and the Austrian Library Network and Services Ltd. (OBVSG) consortium in Austria have expanded their Primo licenses to include all their member institutions.

A new member of the Primo community, Cujas Library was keen to adopt a solution that had been successfully implemented at comparable academic institutions around the world. Annie Le Meur, head of information systems at Cujas Library, noted: “Primo’s open architecture, based on international standards, will enable us to integrate Primo with our other systems, including Ex Libris Aleph®, SFX®, and DigiTool®, and to continue extending Primo as our library systems evolve. The clear, straightforward implementation plan proposed by Ex Libris was also an important factor in our decision.”

Sigurd Praetorius, library director of the University of Duisburg-Essen, commented: “Our decision to implement Ex Libris Primo was based on the seamless integration of the OPAC into the discovery interface and the unique Primo relevance-ranking technology. In view of our requirement to minimize the resources needed for developing and maintaining the search portal, we opted for Primo Direct—the cloud based Primo solution.”

“Having adopted Aleph over five years ago, we were keen to further modernize our library systems with the addition of a discovery layer,” remarked François Renaville, systems librarian at the University of Liège Libraries. “After a thorough analysis of discovery systems on the market, we found major benefits in Primo’s extensive configurability and its strong integration with Aleph. We are also very excited by the new features that will be available in version 4 of Primo.”

“Primo and the Primo Central Index will enable many of our users to explore and access our collections more easily,” added Paul Thirion, library director at the University of Liège.

Marc Daubach, corporate vice president and general manager of Ex Libris Europe, noted: “We are pleased to see Primo extending its market leadership and eagerly await the response of European users to ScholarRank, the enhanced Primo relevance-ranking technology. I also welcome the decision by many customers—current and new—to adopt the Primo Central Index. Users of Primo Central enjoy access to the most significant scholarly materials. An analysis of usage data compiled by Ex Libris indicates that Primo Central covers almost all the journals that contain the most popular articles of the day.”

About the Interuniversity Library of Cujas
Specializing in law, Cujas Library holds one of the largest collections in France of legal and economics resources and serves as a repository of publications for several legal documentation centers as well as the United Nations. The library is governed by an interlibrary agreement between University of Paris 1 and University of Paris 2. Cujas Library includes more than 650,000 law books from all periods. As part of its mandate, the library keeps all the law theses in France—about 160,000 records. It offers a large selection of periodicals in print and electronic form.

For more information, see http://biu-cujas.univ-paris1.fr/.

About the University Duisburg-Essen
Founded in 2003 by the merger of the universities of Duisburg and Essen, the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE) is the youngest university in North Rhine-Westphalia and one of the 10 largest universities in Germany, with students from 130 countries. Research activities focus on five main areas: nanotechnologies, biomedical sciences, urban systems, education, and change in contemporary societies.

For more information, see http://www.uni-due.de/en/index.php.

About the University of Liège
The only completely public university in the Belgian French-speaking community, the University of Liège prides itself on its pluralistic vision and on its pursuit of excellence in teaching, research, and innovation. With a student body numbering 20,000 and a staff of 4,300, of whom 2,800 are teachers or researchers, the University of Liège offers enriching and diversified courses of study, is intensely involved in international research programs (especially the European Union's FP6 and P7 projects), and is in contact with more than 600 institutions throughout the world.

For more information, see http://www.ulg.ac.be/.

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 80 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 more information about Ex Libris Group, see our Web site, join us on Facebook, view our videos, and follow our Twitter page.

Ex Libris
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This release was published on openPR.