News from Ex Libris

Citation

(2002), "News from Ex Libris", Program: electronic library and information systems, Vol. 36 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/prog.2002.28036cab.003

News from Ex Libris

News from Ex Libris

University of Newcastle upon Tyne selects ALEPH 500, MetaLib and SFX from Ex Libris

Ex Libris (UK) Ltd has announced that a contract has been signed with the University of Newcastle upon Tyne to replace the university's current Geac ADVANCE library system with ALEPH 500. In addition, Newcastle will implement MetaLib and SFX. ALEPH 500 will support the core library functions, while MetaLib and SFX will provide the library with a seamless method of access to electronic resources.

"The decision by Newcastle to select Ex Libris is further proof that our team is able to deliver the right product mix to meet the demands of universities within the UK. We are delighted that Newcastle has selected us as its partner. The implementation of ALEPH, MetaLib and SFX will provide students at Newcastle with a fully integrated approach to information discovery," commented Julie Booth, Managing Director, Ex Libris (UK).

Dr Tom Graham, University Librarian at the University of Newcastle, added "We chose the ALEPH product from Ex Libris primarily because we believed that the system would not only meet our library management needs but would also significantly enhance the way in which information could be provided to staff and students. We also were encouraged by the future development potential of the ALEPH system and its capacity for interoperability, which we feel will become increasingly important in the future. We look forward to the partnership with Ex Libris in fulfilling these aims."

The conversion from Geac will be completed in the summer of 2002 with the transfer of 450,000 bibliographic records to the new system. Running on the latest hardware technology from Sun, a Sun Fire V880 platform, the new system will support 70 staff members and 100 PAC users.

The University of Newcastle upon Tyne is a large, multidisciplinary, research-led university and a member of the Russell Group. Originating from a school of medicine established in 1834 and a college of science founded in 1871, Newcastle was awarded university status in 1963. Now numbering over 16,000 students and 4,378 staff, with an annual turnover of £189 million, the school comprises three main faculties: Humanities and Social Sciences, Science and Engineering, and Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. It is constantly strengthening its links with the north-eastern region in terms of student recruitment, the application of research, and partnership with companies.

University of East Anglia chooses ALEPH 500, MetaLib and SFX

The University of East Anglia (UEA) has announced that a contract has been signed with Ex Libris for the installation and implementation of ALEPH 500, MetaLib and SFX. Replacing a Dynix installation, the Ex Libris systems are targeted to go live by the summer of 2002. UEA will also operate ALEPH 500 on behalf of Suffolk College, Otley College, Norwich School of Art and Design, and the Norwich and Norfolk Hospital.

Working at breakneck speed, UEA has already implemented SFX, the reference linking software from Ex Libris. With operations commencing just three weeks after installation on the server, the system now enables students at UEA to link to the following sources:

• •

  ISI Web of Science;

• •

  The MLA, PsycINFO and GEOBASE databases from OCLC;

• •

  The Academic Search Elite and Business Source Elite databases from EBSCOhost;

• •

  The Applied Social Sciences Index and Abstracts and Linguistics & Language Behavior Abstracts databases from CSA.

SFX will become fully operational over the next few months as the linking options are developed.

"The inherent design of ALEPH 500 makes it an ideal choice for an academic consortium of this nature," commented Julie Booth, Managing Director, Ex Libris (UK). Although Ex Libris has been providing consortium systems for a number of years, this will be the first installation of its kind in the UK. UEA and its fellow consortium members have been using their current library automation system for more than eight years. A move to a new system represents a major change for these organisations. I'm very pleased that Ex Libris has been selected as their partner in this venture."

"We are delighted as a consortium to have signed up with Ex Libris," says Jean Steward, Director of Library, Learning and IT Services, University of East Anglia. "We are impressed with the functionality of the current ALEPH system and the forward-looking approach to systems development by Ex Libris. ALEPH provides us with a good platform to extend the partnership within the consortium to meet our common strategic objectives. The MetaLib and SFX functionality is critical to our development plans; our users have been impressed with the demonstrations they have seen to date and are excited about using the new software. We look forward to working with the staff of Ex Libris and are confident that we will have a smooth transition to our systems."

UEA admitted its first 87 undergraduate students (in English studies and biological sciences) in 1963. Today UEA has more than 9,000 undergraduate and almost 4,000 graduate students studying on campus. About a third of the students study part-time, and nearly 1,000 are from outside the European Union. UEA's academic thinking has been distinctive from the outset, as signalled by its choice of the motto "Do Different" and its adoption of an interdisciplinary approach.

The Bank of Italy chooses ALEPH 500

Atlantis s.r.l., the exclusive distributor of Ex Libris products in Italy, has signed a contract with the Bank of Italy for the latest version of ALEPH 500, the integrated library management system. ALEPH 500 will replace the bank's current BIBLNEW system and its Fulcrum information retrieval system, both of which run on procedures specifically developed for use on Oracle.

The Bank of Italy established its own library in 1894, with a legal section and an economics section. In 1914 the library was divided, and the resulting units formed the basis of today's law library and economics library. The latter was named for Paolo Baffi, Governor of the Bank of Italy from 1975-1979.

Specialising in Italian law as related to economics, the Biblioteca Giuridica (law library) has approximately 25,000 monographs and 370 serials, 250 of which are currently published. For many of these titles, as well as for contributed volumes (such as conference proceedings) the library produces systematic analytic records.

The Paolo Baffi Library contains 100,000 monographs and more than 4,000 serials, of which 1,500 are currently published. The library specialises in economics, particularly in the areas of money, central banking, and the theoretical, historical, legal and statistical aspects of banks and finance. In addition, the library devotes space to the social sciences. Its acquisition policy aims to ensure the availability of the most up-to-date Italian and international scientific publications related to economics and to obtain documents of historical value, such as the oldest portion of the library belonging to Lord Lionel Robbins, which was acquired in 1990.

Although the primary users of the Paolo Baffi Library are the bank staff, particularly the economists who work in the research department, the library also offers bibliographic research, reference, microfilm, and photocopying services to non-institutional users, primarily members of the academic and financial communities.

The Bank of Italy libraries devote considerable attention to the analysis of information. Since 1965, the libraries have performed partial or complete reviews of the articles published in over 480 major Italian and international economics periodicalsand have also systematically reviewed numerous contributed volumes. Thelibraries house more than 230 series of working papers published by economic research institutions, 133 annual reports of various central banks, 30 annual reports of international institutions, and about 800 other annual publications, which are generally on statistical topics.

In 1964, the economics library ceased its manual production of catalogue forms and began recording data on punched tape. Twenty years later, the same data were converted to record format and the catalogue became electronic. A relational database was created in 1987, to which all the data migrated. The next step will take place in December 2002, when the records created in 1965 for the Paolo Baffi Library and in 1989 for the Biblioteca Giuridica will be migrated into a single bibliographic database running in ALEPH 500, with a total of about 490,000 bibliographic records.

In addition to the collections represented in its electronic catalogue, the Paolo Baffi Library holds about 40,000 documents that were acquired before 1965 and are listed in a card catalogue; approximately 11,000 volumes that were recently purchased from private collections and have not yet been catalogued; and 10,000 microfilms that provide access to Italian and international newspapers, the archives of the economists of the Cambridge School (J.M. Keynes, N. Kaldor, R.F. Kahn, Joan Robinson, and Austin Robinson), and the collections of the Goldsmiths'-Kress Library of Economic Literature and the Seligman Library. At the moment the Library of Piero Sraffa, which was collected from Trinity College, Cambridge (UK), is being reproduced on microfilm.

With the new ALEPH 500 software and the subsequent availability of library catalogues over the Internet, the Bank of Italy hopes to be better equipped to answer all its information dissemination needs for both its institutional and non-institutional users.

University of New South Wales to implement full range of Ex Libris software

The University of New South Wales (UNSW) has announced its selection of the full range of Ex Libris software to meet its requirements for a new integrated Web-based information system for the new UNSW Library. The ALEPH 500 library management system, MetaLib portal, and SFX reference-linking software will be implemented before the end of 2002, with additional products, including the DigiTool digital asset management system, to be phased in during 2003.

One of the leading teaching and research institutions of Australia, UNSW has been honoured by Business Review Weeklymagazine as Australia's most admired public institution for the last three years. Readers agree that the school "has retained the traditional values of a university while moving ahead in partnership with business. It is considered the most forward-looking university in Australia."

The UNSW Library services the learning, teaching and research needs of the university community (comprising over 35,000 students and 5,000 staff) through five special libraries – Biomedical, Law, Physical Sciences, and Social Sciences and Humanities at the Kensington Campus, and the College of Fine Arts in Paddington, as well as a sixth library – the Water Reference Library – at Manly Vale. Administration, processing and library IT services are centralised at the Kensington Campus, where the new systems will be managed.

Andrew Wells, University Librarian, commented "the UNSW Library will be implementing a system that will provide students with integrated access, independent of time or place, to digital and print information resources to enhance the learning experience and support the university's teaching activities. The new system will also significantly benefit researchers by providing, through one interface, direct access to both traditional and emerging forms of scholarly communication. After a thorough evaluation of the library systems market place we concluded that Ex Libris provided the most comprehensive solution available."

Mr Wells added "The University Library is rapidly increasing the delivery of resources and services in digital form directly to the desktop, and the ability of the system to provide the interoperability required in this environment was a critical factor in the evaluation process. In the last 12 months alone, around one million articles have been downloaded from electronic journal publishers and full-text database aggregators, accompanied by over 1.8 million searches of citation and bibliographic databases. In this environment, providing direct access to information at the article level is a major goal. The Library is reducing its collecting of physical information resources, particularly serials, in favour of licensed electronic, as well as digital, information for use by the UNSW community. We are particularly looking forward to the Ex Libris software enabling us to manage and expand our delivery of services in this area in an efficient and integrated manner."

Michael McLellan, General Manager of Ex Libris in Australia, said "This contract is a major milestone for Ex Libris in Australia, and we are very pleased to be working with one of the leading universities in the country. The evaluation process was extremely thorough and based on a vision of system implementation that many other institutions can benefit from. The UNSW Library has an approach to the delivery of service in an online teaching and learning environment that is in accord with how Ex Libris believes we should be harnessing the technology to provide information to students and researchers. As a result, we are looking forward to the implementation and growth of our systems in such a forward-looking institution."

The University of New South Wales joins UNILINC Ltd, Curtin University of Technology, and the University of Technology, Sydney, as users of Ex Libris software in Australia.

Ex Libris is a leading worldwide developer of high performance applications for libraries, information centres and researchers. A multinational company, Ex Libris has offices around the world. ALEPH, the Ex Libris integrated library solution, has been installed at over 700 sites in 48 countries.

Other Ex Libris software products include MetaLib, an information portal for library collections that provides libraries, institutions and consortia with a standardised user interface; SFX, a context-sensitive reference linking solution for heterogeneous electronic resources in the scholarly information environment; and DigiTool, a solution for building digital collections as components of an overall digital strategy.

For further information please contact: Ex Libris (UK) Ltd, Bridge House, 119-23 Station Rd, Hayes, Middlesex, UB3 4BX, UK. Tel: +44 (0) 20 8561 5614; Fax: +44 (0) 20 8561 5634; E-mail: exlibris@exlibris.co.uk URL: www.exlibrisgroup.com