July 6, 2005
Liege, Belgium
Ex Libris (France) is pleased to announce that following an extensive evaluation process, the province of Liege in Belgium has chosen the ALEPH 500™ integrated library solution to replace their existing home-grown system. The province of Liege has also selected a number of ALEPH 500 add-on modules including ADAM (ALEPH Digital Asset Management) and ARC (ALEPH Reporting Center).
According to Ms. Remacle, Head Librarian, and Mr. Beaulen, IT Director: Since the 1980s, the computer management of the library has been based on a home-grown system which no longer met the current requirements of such a sophisticated library. After examining all the known systems on the market, the ALEPH 500 solution was finally chosen. This decision was based to a large extent on the reliability of the system and its ability to meet the requirements of the library as well as the experience of the Ex Libris staff in projects for large consortial customers.
Once the ALEPH 500 system goes live, it will manage the collections of the Liege province Media Library–including large numbers of videos and CDs. The open architecture of this solution will enable us to build a huge virtual library which will provide services to the towns and villages of the Liege province that wish to join the project, continue Remacle and Beaulen.
I believe that this new, and very important, success was based on the distinctive assets of both the ALEPH 500 system and on Ex Libris unique qualities as a company, explains Frederic Lefevre, Managing Director of Ex Libris France. The functional wealth of our solution, the ability of ALEPH 500 to integrate easily into new libraries, our excellent customer references, and our geographic and linguistic proximity to the customer were all key elements in the closing of this very important deal.
About the Chiroux Library:
The Chiroux Library is one of the largest public libraries of Belgiums French community. The library houses one million documents, over 600 subscriptions to e-journals and serves 42,000 patrons with 780,000 annual loans.
For additional information on the Chiroux Library, please see http://bib.chiroux-croisiers.liege.be/
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.
