Endeavor Information Systems made a number of announcements at ALA Midwinter concerning how it names its products. The company has entirely retired The ENCompass brand, formerly associated with several of the company's products.
Here's the new line-up:
- Curator replaces ENCompass for replaces ENCompass for Digital Collections, Endeavor's product for creating, searching, and managing local digital content. A revamped version of the product, the first version to take the Curator name, will appear in mid-2006.
- Journals Onsite replaces ENCompass for Journals Onsite, a platform for hosting electronic journals locally. The product works with content from all publishers, providing search, storage, and management capabilities.
- Several of Endeavor's products now comprise what is called the Endeavor Discovery Layer. The changes here are more than cosmetic; Endeavor has discarded ENCompass for Resource Access, its metasearch-environment offering, which was based on a combination of its own software components and some from MuseGlobal. The company's new metasearch offering, Discover: Finder, relies on technol- relies on technol- Finder ogy licensed from TDNet. Endeavor expects to add more products to its Discovery Layer suite in the coming months.
- Endeavor Reporting is now called Endeavor Analyzer.
Other product names that will remain unchanged include: Voyager, the company's flagship ILS; the LinkFinderPlus link server, and the Meridian electronicresource management system.
Personnel changes at Endeavor include the appointment of Geoffrey Adams to a newly formed position as director of archive solutions. Adams, an Elsevier veteran, was previously director of IT Solutions for Endeavor's parent company. The creation of this position reflects the company's interest in developing products and services to assist libraries in archiving local content. Katrina Anderson, who was appointed director of presales and sales operations in August 2005, has left the company.
In a move to prepare for a China market expansion, Endeavor announced a business alliance with Jiangsu Huiwen Software Company, a major libraryautomation vendor in that country. The company will participate in the development of local interfaces for Endeavor's products and will promote Endeavor products in China. Jiangsu Huiwen offers one of the major libraryautomaton systems, Libsys2000, used in China. The company will continue to market its own ILS in addition to Endeavor's products.