Athens, March 26 2003. The American School of Classical Studies at Athens and the British School at Athens have chosen Aleph 500 for a joint catalogue of their three libraries, the Blegen and Gennadius Libraries of the American School and the Library of the British School. The American School and the British School share the same block in central Athens, and thus the decision to create a joint catalogue was a natural one. Both institutions are centers of study for all aspects of ancient, medieval and modern Greece, and together have a total of over 240,000 volumes. The Blegen Library focuses on classical antiquity and the Gennadius Library on post-classical Greece, while the Library of the British School covers the full range of Greek studies; all actively collect works that are unavailable in the United States and Great Britain. All three are pre-eminent libraries in Greece, serving the needs both of each School's own members, but also the Greek academic community. Holdings range from monographs and periodicals to rare books, manuscripts, and extensive archives. A fully automated catalogue is new to all three libraries, which are still using card catalogues.
"In choosing a system, our key requirement was the use of Unicode for Greek characters", said Camilla MacKay, library manager of the American School of Classical Studies,. "A large percentage of our holdings are in Greek, and we decided that the only way to fully represent our collections was to use Greek characters, rather than transliteration. We were impressed by Aleph 500's presence in increasing numbers of academic libraries in the US and Britain, which, together with Ex Libris's long-term support of non-Roman characters, decided our choice".
About Ex Libris
Ex Libris is a leading worldwide developer of high-performance applications for libraries, information centers, and researchers. A multinational company, Ex Libris has offices around the world. ALEPH, the Ex Libris integrated library solution, has been installed at over 750 sites in 50 countries. MetaLib, the information portal for library collections, and SFX, the context-sensitive linking solution for heterogeneous electronic resources in the scholarly information environment, have been purchased by more than 320 customers in 23 countries. The DigiTool solution for constructing digital collections as components of an overall digital strategy rounds out the Ex Libris product suite. For more information about Ex Libris, see www.exlibrisgroup.com.
