Three South African Universities Go Live with Ex Libris Alma and Primo

LONDON, UK, January 18, 2018 – Ex Libris^®, a ProQuest company, is pleased to announce that the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, the University of Cape Town, and the University of the Western Cape are now operational with the Ex Libris Alma^® library services platform and Primo^® discovery and delivery solution. They join Stellenbosch University, the first university in Africa to choose Alma, which went live in early 2017.

The South African universities are realizing added value through Alma’s unified resource management and cloud-based platform while Primo makes their library collections more accessible and searchable for researchers and students. Ex Libris solutions are designed to put libraries at the center of universities’ teaching, learning, and research, a factor that was important to the South African universities in their choice of Alma and Primo.

Dr. Elisha Chiware, library director at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT), explained, “Our mission is to be at the heart of technology education and innovation in Africa, providing first-class teaching and learning and strengthening the quality and effectiveness of our research and knowledge production. With the move to Alma and Primo, we now have a platform on which we can develop new and improved services that support our vision.”

Gwenda Thomas, the executive director of university libraries at the University of Cape Town (UCT), remarked, “We strive to be an excellent library that offers a strategically strong environment supporting research, teaching, and learning. To accomplish our goals and those of the university, we must provide superior academic information services. Alma and Primo will enable us to design, implement, and develop such services, and the analytics that these Ex Libris solutions generate will serve as evidence of the library’s impact on the university.”

Dr. Shirlene Neerputh, director of library services at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) explained, “UWC library services is enhancing access via new technologies, enabling better discovery of information and supporting teaching, learning, and innovative research in the university and beyond. Our new library systems aim to improve academic success and sustainable research. With Alma and Primo, we will deliver an even higher level of service for our students and will make sure that the right resources are available when needed. Taking advantage of the streamlined Alma workflows, our staff will have more time to devote to increasing the ways in which the library supports our students and academic colleagues.”

Ofer Mosseri, general manager and vice president of Ex Libris EMEA, said, “I am delighted to welcome CPUT, UCT, and UWC to the South African community of Alma and Primo users and, indeed, to the community representing more than 800 live Alma institutions worldwide. The Alma and Primo solutions’ support of research, teaching and learning, along with our forward-thinking roadmap, which has seen us developing research data and course reading list management tools, will support our South African customers today and well into the future.”

About the Cape Peninsula University of Technology

The Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) is one of the six universities of technology in South Africa, and the largest university in the province with over 32,000 students enrolled in six faculties on five campuses. The CPUT library was established in January 2005 when two schools, Cape Technikon and Peninsula Technikon, merged to form the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. The library provides resources, information, and information literacy programs to support learning and research at the various campuses. The strength of each library collection reflects the academic programs offered at that campus.

For more information, see http://www.cput.ac.za/.

About the University of Cape Town

The University of Cape Town (UCT) is South Africa's oldest university and is one of Africa's leading teaching and research institutions. The university has six faculties, which address students' teaching and learning needs. More than 60 specialist research units provide supervision for postgraduate work and are home to more than a quarter of South Africa's A-rated researchers—academics who are considered world leaders in their fields. UCT Libraries came into being in 1905, and today its collection consists of more than 1.2 million volumes, over 72,000 e-journal titles, more than 28,500 print journal titles, 190 high-quality electronic databases, and over 38,000 audiovisual resources.

For more information, see http://www.uct.ac.za/.

About the University of the Western Cape

The University of the Western Cape (UWC) is a national university, alert to its African and international context as it strives to be a place of quality, a place to grow. It is committed to excellence in teaching, learning, and research; to nurturing the cultural diversity of South Africa; and to responding in critical and creative ways to the needs of a society in transition. UWC's key concerns with access, equity, and quality in higher education arise from extensive practical engagement in helping the historically marginalized participate fully in the life of the nation. Today, over 22,000 students are educated at UWC. For more information, see https://www.uwc.ac.za.

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 is committed to supporting the important work happening in the world’s research and learning communities. The company curates content that matters to the advancement of knowledge, assembling an archive of billions of vetted, indexed documents. It simplifies workflows so that people and institutions use time effectively. And because ProQuest connects information communities, complex networks of systems and processes work together efficiently. With ProQuest, finding answers and deriving insights is straightforward and leads to extraordinary outcomes.

ProQuest and its companies and affiliates – Ex Libris, Alexander Street, Bowker – stand for better research, better learning, better insights. ProQuest enables people to change their world.