Ex Libris going Library 2.0 with Primo?

Ex Libris just announced a new product called: Primo in their April Newsletter.
Primo seems to include some nice Library 2.0 ideas.


What is Primo?

Primo is an enterprise-level solution for the discovery of institutional resources and the delivery of materials and services for different types of collections including electronic, digital, and print materials.

Is Primo just a search engine?
Primo is more than just a search engine; it is a complete solution for the discovery and delivery of diverse content types. Primo preprocesses, normalizes, and enriches library-selected content and makes the discovery and delivery of many data sources possible.

Primo includes:

  • Single-point discovery of materials held in multiple catalogs, repositories, and remote resources. Because users searching for information do not care how the library stores or delivers content, Primo provides discovery and delivery from many data sources through one user interface. Primo accesses a variety of back-end applications transparently to the users.
  • An end-to-end discovery-to-delivery service that optimizes the delivery mechanism—for example, by linking directly to electronic full text if available or by indicating the availability of a print copy.
    Sophisticated navigation of search results. Primo offers faceted browsing, ranking, sorting, filtering, “Did you mean?" and other tools to focus and broaden search results.
  • Social computing features, which enable users to interact with the system by contributing and sharing items such as reviews and tags.
  • A publishing platform that normalizes and enriches data harvested from various applications. This enrichment includes grouping similar items (FRBR- Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records), organizing data into categories (such as date ranges), enabling full-text searches of content, and processing of results to support advanced functionality.
  • We will keep an eye on this new product...

Andre Keyzer – Thu, 2006 – 04 – 06 11:36