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Ex Libris Announces the Beta Launch of Primo Central

Ex Libris Group (www.exlibrisgroup.com) announced the launch of Primo Central for beta testing at 14 partner institutions. When searching in their institution's Primo interface, users in partner libraries will have seamless access to the Primo Central mega-aggregate of scholarly econtent. Primo Central is planned for general release in mid-2010.

Primo Central is a centralized index consisting of data harvested from primary and secondary publishers and aggregators. With Primo Central, users simultaneously search locally managed collections and global econtent and receive search results that are blended into a single relevance-ranked list. Libraries can tailor the relevance ranking to ensure appropriate emphasis on their local collections. Ex Libris provides Primo Central as a service, in a cloud computing environment.

Jody Combs, assistant dean for information technology at Vanderbilt University, a Primo Central library partner, commented: "Primo Central is a service we envisioned from the beginning of our development partnership for Primo. We are excited to see it moving from theory to practice. Not only will Primo Central draw attention to materials that some of our users were not aware of previously-thus improving return on our investment in e-collections-but it clearly indicates the origin of the materials for the benefit of those users who value specific scholarly collections. Using faceted categorization to select a particular collection, a researcher can narrow down the result list to show only items from that collection. The beauty is that the researcher can perform all these tasks from within the Primo interface."

Source: Ex Libris Group