InfoTech Briefs: Polaris, ebrary, Serials Solutions, 3M, ABC-CLIO
Polaris partners with LibraryThing for Libraries, ebrary incorporating new features, Tom Fitzgerald joins ABC-CLIO
Michael Rogers -- Library Journal, 7/7/2009 7:36:00 AM
- Polaris Library Systems partners with LibraryThing for Libraries
- Dartmouth launching open beta test of Serials Solutions’ Summon
- ebrary incorporating new features
- 3M Library Systems signs Florida's Lee County Library for RFID
- Tom Fitzgerald joins ABC-CLIO as VP, Sales & Marketing
Polaris Library Systems has signed a partnership agreement with LibraryThing for Libraries (LTFL) that will allow the ILS vendor’s customers to integrate LTFL functionality into the Polaris PowerPAC, giving them the ability to browse tags, find similar titles, and easily locate other editions. LTFL allows libraries to enrich their online catalog with Library 2.0 applications, using data from the public LibraryThing database of 40 million records, features such as tags, recommendations, reviews, and ratings.
Dartmouth College Library, Hanover, NH, is launching of an open beta test of Serials Solutions’ Summon™ web-scale discovery service. In addition to librarians, the Summon™ service is now being used by students and faculty at Dartmouth, enabling them to search the contents of the library—physical and digital—from a single search box. “We’ve been eagerly awaiting the day when we could introduce our students and faculty to this single, convenient, compelling, high-yielding discovery system for our scholarly articles, newspaper entries, books, and the metadata that leads to the rest of our holdings,” said David Seaman, Dartmouth’s associate librarian for information management. Summon™ also is launching commercially, and a variety of new content providers, including more than 20 society publishers hosted on American Institute of Physics’s Scitation® platform, are being added. The service now includes nearly 100 contributors, including key partners ProQuest and Gale—aggregators representing more than 4700 publishers.
ebrary is incorporating a number of new features that the vendor said make it quicker and easier to discover, use, and manage information online. The vendor has improved its QuickView Reader, which doesn’t require software downloads or installations. New QuickView features include InfoTools, which networks every word with other online resources; copying; highlighting; annotating; and turning text into hyperlinks. In May, ebrary added printing to QuickView as well as integration with RefWorks and EndNote for easy citation management. ebrary has enhanced its bookshelf feature, and end users can now email folders containing notes, highlights, hyperlinks, and bookmarks.
3M Library Systems has signed the Lee County Library System, FL, for RFID installation. Lee County staff report that 3M’s experience providing RFID systems was a key differentiator, as was the company’s local base of service people. With a collection of 1.4 million items and an annual circulation of almost five million, Lee County has seen dramatic increases in visits and circulation over the past several years. Library staff believe the increased efficiency offered by the automated systems will allow the technology to pay for itself in a few years.
Tom Fitzgerald has joined ABC-CLIO as Vice President, Sales & Marketing. He will be based out of the Santa Barbara, CA, office and report directly to company president Becky Snyder. He has over 30 years of sales and marketing management experience in both the private and public sectors. Fitzgerald previously worked at Digital Equipment, Apple, Dell Computer, Gateway, PowerSchool (now Pearson School Systems), and others. Most recently, he helped found and was CEO of Ascend Education, a provider of web-based math intervention software solutions for the K–12 market.
