September 13, 2005
Newton, MA
The Ex Libris Group is pleased to announce the general release of Verde, the Companys new solution for electronic resource management. Verde is a stand-alone system that allows libraries to manage the life cycles of all their electronic resources from initial discovery and trial to usage tracking to renewal. The Harvard University Library and Massachusetts Institute of Technology were development partners with Ex Libris. Harvard and MIT are also members of the Digital Library Federation Electronic Resource Management Initiative (DLF ERMI), the group that developed the ERM functional specifications — the industry standard for all ERM systems.
Ted Koppel, Product Manager for Verde said, ERM has become the critical issue for librarians. The complexity of electronic resources management created a need for a new kind of solution — one that will handle the dynamic lifecycle of an e-resource as well as generate the statistical information that librarians need to make intelligent decisions. We addressed this need by building Verde as a stand-alone solution that interacts with our SFX® KnowledgeBase but one able to integrate well with existing library systems because we designed it for interoperability.
Mr, Koppel added, Electronic resources constitute an increasingly large percentage of library acquisitions budgets – in some case as much as 50% of a librarys purchasing. We see ERM, and Verde in particular, as being the hub of future library activity rather than just an ancillary cost-analysis tool. It is the most comprehensive ERMS available.
Verde has already been purchased by twelve institutions world-wide since it entered beta testing earlier this year.
About Ex Libris:
Ex Libris is a leading worldwide developer of high-performance applications for libraries, information centers, and researchers. A multinational company, Ex Libris has offices around the world. ALEPH, the Ex Libris integrated library solution, has been installed at over 1250 sites in 51 countries. MetaLib®, the information portal for library collections, and SFX, the context-sensitive linking solution for heterogeneous electronic resources in the scholarly information environment, have been purchased by more than 830 customers in 36 countries. The DigiTool solution for constructing digital collections and Verde, the new electronic resource management (ERM) system, round out the Ex Libris product suite.
