NEWS

International Publishers Join the Ex Libris Alma Community Zone Program

The program improves libraries’ e-book acquisition workflows
and increases the discoverability of acquired content

Ex Libris® Group is pleased to announce that Springer Science+Business Media (Springer) and the American Council of Learned Societies Humanities E-Book (HEB) University Press have opted to participate in the Ex Libris Alma Community Zone program. These organizations join other information providers that are already members of the program, among them ProQuest Ebook Library (EBL) and ebrary.

The Alma Community Zone, a major component of the Alma library management solution, includes a central community catalog that increases librarians’ efficiency by streamlining acquisition and cataloging processes. Under the Alma Community Zone program, Ex Libris loads publishers’ MARC records into the central community catalog, instead of each library loading the records into its local catalog. As a result, librarians are spared time-consuming processes associated with acquisition, the updating of records, and authority control. By contributing their metadata to the community catalog, Springer and HEB will help libraries streamline their acquisition workflows via Alma, and end users will benefit from the ease of discovery of these publishers’ collections.

Berendina van Straalen, head of rights and permissions at Springer, remarked: “We are happy to offer our customers full metadata management in Alma, including the indexing of our collections in Primo Central and full bibliographic coverage in the Alma community catalog. We are always looking to create the optimal conditions for libraries to manage and expose the Springer e-book catalog, facilitating the discovery of our extensive collection by end users.”

Sharona Sagi, director of resource management strategy at Ex Libris, commented: “The selection, acquisition, and management of e-books can be complex, expensive, and time-consuming, often causing delays in their availability to end users. We are delighted that Springer and HEB have added their metadata to the community catalog, thus freeing their customers from uploading and updating e-book metadata. In addition to benefiting these publishers’ customer community and increasing the discoverability of their collections, their involvement in the program supports their primary goal of making knowledge more easily available to researchers.”

www.springer.com.
http://www.humanitiesebook.org
www.exlibrisgroup.com