The Penn Libraries Selects Ex Libris Alma for Unified Resource Management
PHILADELPHIA, PA and CHICAGO, IL, September 8, 2016 – The Penn Libraries and Ex Libris®, a ProQuest company, are pleased to announce that the Ex Libris Alma® library management solution has been selected to serve the Penn Libraries’ unified resource management needs. The Penn Libraries is the 31st member of the Association of Research Libraries® (ARL) to opt for the Alma service, establishing it as a leader among library systems being adopted within ARL. With its comprehensive functionality, maturity, and openness, Alma will enable the Penn Libraries to continue to work with open-source discovery and adopt more optimal workflows.
The Penn Libraries serve the world-class faculty and students of the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League institution. A founding member of the BorrowDirect resource-sharing partnership, the Penn Libraries is also active in the Blacklight Hydra and VIVO open source communities.“Alma is a robust, proven alternative for managing research library workflows—arguably the most mature system on the market today,” said H. Carton Rogers III, vice provost and director of the Penn Libraries. “Its technology will facilitate system-to-system integrations, helping us customize the user experience and enabling our IT practices to conform to our business processes rather than the other way around. With our transition to Alma, we will still be able to use the Summon® index for federated article search as well as retain our own discovery innovations achieved with Franklin, our locally designed discovery solution.”
“As a cloud-based service, Alma will free us from maintaining a costly and staff-intensive computing infrastructure.” Rogers continued, “Ex Libris will bear the responsibility of managing servers, software updates, and disaster recovery, thus enabling us to focus on service provision, feature improvements, and other IT priorities. We have been using Voyager for nearly twenty years, and the fact that Voyager and Alma share a common lineage through Ex Libris and earlier developers assures us of an easy migration. We look forward to continuing our fruitful, long-standing relationship with our partners at Ex Libris.”
Jane Burke, Ex Libris vice president of customer success, noted, “All of us are thrilled that the Penn Libraries have opted for Alma. We shall be collaborating closely with them on integrating Alma with open-source discovery as well as on enhancing library workflows. The adoption of Alma by the Penn Libraries is proof once again of Alma’s standing as the library management system of choice for academic libraries.”
About the Penn Libraries
The Penn Libraries serve the world-class faculty and students of the University of Pennsylvania’s 12 schools. The Libraries’ collections comprise more than seven million volumes, nearly 200,000 journals, some three million digitized images, and extraordinary rare and unique materials that document the intellectual and cultural experience of ancient and modern civilizations. Through collaborative relationships, the Libraries supplement Penn’s great local collections with access to the Center for Research Libraries (approximately five million items), the combined holdings of all the Ivy League schools (more than 70 million volumes), and exclusive electronic access to some two million public domain titles in the HathiTrust collections. Today, the Libraries play a role in developing new technologies for information discovery and dissemination and are noted for contributions to digital library design. To learn more about the Penn Libraries, visit http://www.library.upenn.edu.
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.