Number of Live Alma Institutions Passes 500

JERUSALEM, Israel, September 1, 2016 – Ex Libris^®, a ProQuest company, is pleased to announce that it has passed the mark of 500 live Alma institutions with the implementation of Alma in the Renouvaud network in Switzerland. The dynamic Renouvaud library network serves the entire canton of Vaud, which includes over 100 libraries. Its strategic and financial management is under the direction of the University Library of Lausanne (Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire – BCU Lausanne).

Alma continues to be the library platform of choice for academic, state, and national libraries and consortia. The robust, scalable Alma infrastructure is in daily use by more than 20,000 library staff members around the world, managing over 470 million bibliographic records.

The Alma service’s success has grown with the ongoing enrichment of functionality through monthly releases and through constant collaboration between Ex Libris and the active Alma customer community. This collaborative spirit and the openness of the Alma platform are evident in the more than one million API transactions made to Alma on a daily basis and in over 400 suggestions from Alma users that have been posted to the Alma Idea Exchange since its inception in September 2015, many already added to the Alma roadmap or implemented.

Jeannette Frey, director of BCU Lausanne, said, “As a result of our move to Alma, we have gained in three important areas. First, we have now unified all of our electronic, print, and digital collections into a single library catalog, which makes managing, understanding, and promoting their usage much easier. Second, with the streamlining of professional library workflows by Alma, especially in the critical areas of selection and acquisitions, we expect to increase the efficiency of our operations. Finally, Alma has a proven track record of supporting successful consortial implementations in Europe, Asia Pacific, and the United States. We are now discovering ways to foster broader and stronger collaboration between the libraries in our network.”

“We are very proud to have reached 500 live Alma institutions, especially having just celebrated Alma’s fourth anniversary,” commented Bar Veinstein, Ex Libris vice president of resource management. “Through our long-term commitment to development and our collaboration with Alma users, the Alma will continue to meet the needs of libraries today and in the future.”

About Renouvaud

The Renouvaud network brings together 110 Renouvaud library sites, including BCU Lausanne, archives, and museums, as well as heritage, academic, specialized, medical, municipal, and school libraries throughout the Swiss canton of Vaud. The objectives of the network are the development of a common set of library practices, sharing of activities, the provision of an integrated library management system (ILS), training, and the exchange of business information. The strategic and financial management of the Renouvaud network is under the direction of the BCU Lausanne.

About Ex Libris

Ex Libris, a ProQuest company, is a leading global provider of cloud-based solutions for higher education. Offering SaaS solutions for the management and discovery of the full spectrum of library and scholarly materials, as well as mobile campus solutions driving student engagement and success, Ex Libris serves thousands of customers in 90 countries. For more information about Ex Libris, see our website, and join us on Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

About ProQuest (http://www.proquest.com)

ProQuest connects people with vetted, reliable information. Key to serious research, the company’s products are a gateway to the world’s knowledge including dissertations, governmental and cultural archives, news, historical collections and ebooks. ProQuest technologies serve users across the critical points in research, helping them discover, access, share, create and manage information.

The company’s cloud-based technologies offer flexible solutions for librarians, students and researchers through the ProQuest^®, Bowker^®, Coutts^® information services, Dialog^®, ebrary^®, EBL™, and SIPX^® businesses – and notable research tools such as the Summon^® discovery service, the RefWorks^® citation and reference management platform, MyiLibrary^® ebook platform, the Pivot^® research development tool and Intota™. The company is headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with offices around the world.