November 4, 2009
Primo will provide unified access to cultural heritage information from the Mountain West Digital Library’s disparate digital content platforms
Chicago, IL – November 4, 2009. Ex Libris® Group is pleased to announce that the Utah Academic Library Consortium has chosen the Ex Libris Primo® discovery and delivery platform for the Mountain West Digital Library. The Mountain West Digital Library (MWDL) is an aggregation of digital collections about the Mountain West region of the United States and provides free access to more than 270,000 resources in 314 collections from universities, colleges, public libraries, museums, archives, and historical societies in Utah, Nevada, Idaho, and Hawaii. Today, 11 regional hubs host the digital collections of 43 collections partners. Eight of the hosting hubs also serve as full-service digitization centers, providing scanning and metadata services.
”Primo will streamline MWDL’s harvesting operations into a nightly update of information from all the participating institutions and allow us to provide much more sophisticated searching for our users,” explained Sandra McIntyre, program director of the Mountain West Digital Library. ”This data will be harvested from a variety of digital asset management systems, including an ArchivalWare™ system at the Utah State Library; the Digital Commons system at Utah State University; the Health Education Assets Library (HEAL) at the University of Utah Health Sciences Library; and CONTENTdm® systems at the University of Utah and at various colleges and universities in Utah and Nevada. With Primo, MWDL users will enjoy next-generation discovery capabilities across the full spectrum of resources, including faceted browsing, search-term suggestions, relevance and popularity-based ranking, and much more.”
Carl Grant, president of Ex Libris North America, commented: ”We are delighted to welcome the Utah Academic Library Consortium to the North American Primo community. The intuitive search interface of Primo will enable the Mountain West Digital Library to make its extensive collections easily available to the public. We look forward to working in close collaboration with the consortium in the coming months and years.”
The new system will be hosted by the University of Utah.
About the Utah Academic Library Consortium:
The Utah Academic Library Consortium (UALC) was established in 1971 and consists of all public and private academic libraries in accredited institutions of higher education in the state of Utah. The purpose of UALC is to cooperate in continually improving the availability and delivery of library and information services to the higher education community, to the state of Utah, and to partner libraries in Nevada.
For additional information on the Utah Academic Library Consortium, see http://www.ualc.net/.
About the Mountain West Digital Library:
The Mountain West Digital Library is a portal to digital resources from universities, colleges, public libraries, museums, archives, and historical societies in Utah, Nevada, Idaho, and Hawaii. As a distributed digital repository, MWDL provides access to significant, rare, and/or unique resources from the libraries, archives, and other cultural heritage institutions of the Mountain West region. Over 40 partners participate in a hub-and-spoke system supported by 11 hubs in Utah and Nevada. The digital collections include photographs, maps, artworks, books, newspapers, scholarly documents, videos, sounds, oral histories, and scholarly publications.
For additional information on the Mountain West Digital Library, see http://mwdl.org/.
About the University of Utah:
The University of Utah is the state’s oldest and largest institution of higher education and is a major research university. The University offers over 100 undergraduate degree programs and more than 90 graduate degree programs to over 28,000 students.
For additional information on the University of Utah, see www.utah.edu.
About Ex Libris
Ex Libris is a leading provider of automation solutions for academic, national, and research libraries. Offering the only comprehensive product suite for electronic, digital, and print materials, Ex Libris provides efficient, user-friendly products that serve the needs of libraries today and will facilitate their transition into the future. Ex Libris maintains an impressive customer base consisting of thousands of sites in more than 75 countries on six continents.
Dedicated to developing creative solutions in close collaboration with customers, Ex Libris enables libraries to maximize productivity and efficiency and, at the same time, greatly enhance the user experience. By empowering users to discover and obtain the information they need, libraries ensure their position as the bridge to knowledge.
For additional information on Ex Libris Group, see our Web site, visit our Initiatives and Commentary blogs, and follow our Twitter page.
