DES PLAINES, ILLINOIS, Feb. 24, 2005: Endeavor Information Systems is pleased to announce the first general release of ENCompass for Journals OnSite (EJOS), a sophisticated new system for locally storing and providing a single point of access to electronic journal content from any publisher. Using EJOS, libraries can locally load the full text journal content they license, and enable their end users to search, browse, and view journal articles through one standard user interface.
Beta testing of EJOS was completed earlier this year with the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI), a scientific research organization. The Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL) recently installed EJOS at the University of Toronto (UT), where EJOS will support access to electronic journal content for OCUL's twenty member libraries as part of the cooperative Ontario Scholars Portal Project. Other libraries and organizations around the world – in the United States, Italy, Germany, Turkey, China, and elsewhere – are also turning to EJOS for local electronic journal storage and access.
By supporting local loading and storage of licensed journal content, EJOS enables large research institutions and consortia to create permanent repositories of electronic journal content. The Ontario Council of University Libraries, for example, is using EJOS to store and provide access to thousands of journal titles from more than a dozen different publishers. Using the entitlements feature of EJOS, OCUL is able to restrict access among its member libraries to only those journals that each member licenses – an important requirement for any consortium.
To date, OCUL has loaded more than 2 million articles into EJOS; over the next few months, they expect to load a total of more than 7 million articles into the system. Because the underlying EJOS architecture, based on Endeavor's ENCompass technology, was designed specifically to handle large collections of data, OCUL and other libraries will be able to load that and more into their EJOS installations.
“EJOS is the only tool powerful enough to manage our current collection of over 5,500 journals and 7 million articles with near real-time indexing and sub-second search responses from the integrated FAST data search™ engine,” said Alan Darnell, OCUL Scholarly Information Resources (SIR) Project Manager. “EJOS also positions us well for growth as we continue to add new titles and extend coverage for other titles retrospectively by adding backfiles.”
To handle loading electronic journal content from potentially any publisher, EJOS supports a unique content loader architecture. Out-of-the box, EJOS supports loader programs for most major journal publishers. Customers can also write their own loader programs, and many have. For example, the initial OCUL EJOS implementation will include content from fourteen publishers, including the American Chemical Society, American Psychological Association, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Elsevier, Kluwer, Project MUSE, Springer, Wiley, Emerald, Blackwell, IEEE, Sage and Berkeley Electronic Press.
EJOS supports library staff by making it easy to load large amounts of electronic journal content, and also makes it easy for researchers to find what they want. The EJOS user interface was designed with end users in mind, and as a result makes it easy for researchers to find the articles they need, quickly and effectively. As a focus of the Endeavor Usability Initiative, the EJOS interface was developed to enable end users to start from just one location to easily search across journal content from all licensed publishers. Further, researchers can browse through all the electronic journal content stored in EJOS from journal title or subject category all the way down to the article level.
“We took a very holistic approach to developing EJOS,” said J. Michael Visser, ENCompass Product Manager. “By focusing on the needs of multiple audiences – the system administrators who will run EJOS, the librarians who will use EJOS and the end users who will search EJOS – we intended to provide a total solution for libraries. And I'm pleased to say, we succeeded.”
About ENCompass for Journals OnSite (EJOS)
An enterprise-level system for supporting the local storage, searching and browsing of electronic journal content in one location, ENCompass for Journals OnSite (EJOS) helps institutions meet the needs of the research communities they serve. For more information about EJOS, visit http://encompass.endinfosys.com/ejos.htm or contact Endeavor directly at info@endinfosys.com.
About Endeavor Information Systems
Endeavor Information Systems, based in Des Plaines, IL, was founded in September of 1994. A wholly owned subsidiary of Elsevier, Endeavor offers a complete line of library solutions for traditional and digital collections. Visit Endeavor at www.endinfosys.com for more information about Endeavor Meridian, Voyager, ENCompass or LinkFinderPlus.
