NEWS

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

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.”

http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/category/ELympics