NEWS

Ex Libris Announces the Beta Launch of Primo Central

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

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."

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