November 2, 2007 -- Emeryville, CA. The Pence Law Library at American University's Washington College of Law (WCL) in Washington, D.C. has selected the Encore discovery services platform to provide superior discovery of legal information in an interdisciplinary environment. Encore will integrate with Millennium to provide real-time circulation and patron activity information as part of the discovery process.
"The challenge for the Library has always been finding a way to make our online library relevant to users," says Billie Jo Kaufman, Associate Dean for Library and Information Resources. "Encore's faceted search results give people information the way they are used to getting it on the web. The more familiar we make the search environment with features like tagging and faceted search, the better we're able to promote our electronic and print information. Encore search results play out differently, in a way that's appropriate to 21st-century searching. We try to use a catalog as a portal and Encore will help us put everything in one place in an elegant fashion."
Kaufman continues: "In addition, the WCL Office of Technology and Pence Law Library are cutting edge. Ours was one of the first law schools to podcast, for example. Encore helps us keep pace. One of our goals is to always stretch innovation and stress creativity to provide the best possible services to our faculty and students."
The Right Choice for a Law Library
Like other campuses, American University offers a legal curriculum as well as courses on intellectual property, health and medicine, and journalism. Says Kaufman: "Law library materials have become so much more interdisciplinary that the Encore product will allow users to see easily the relationships within our metadata, as with the tag cloud, and the depth and breadth of the collection. We are excited to be one of the first adopters of Encore in the law library community."
Long-Time Partners
The College of Law has been an Innovative partner for over 20 years and was the seventh library to join the Innovative Users Group (IUG). "We've always had wonderful performance and service from Innovative," says Kaufmann: "Our staff is happy with Millennium. We've worked with other ILS systems, there is a reason Innovative has a large market for its products."
Looking Ahead
The library staff look forward to experimenting with some of the patron interaction features in Encore. Says Kaufman: "As a first step, we will use Encore to access all of our metadata and then roll out the social features of Encore (for example, tagging) and see how good of a fit that would be for our campus."
About The Washington College of Law
The Washington College of Law (WCL), founded in 1896, has been part of American University since 1949. The College is a member of the Association of American Law Schools and is approved by the American Bar Association. It also meets the requirements for preparation for the bar in all states and carries the certification for the United States District Court for the District of Columbia and the New York State Department of Education. As of October 1, 2006, there are 1,216 full-time JD students, 267 part-time JD students, 160 LLM students and 15 SJD students at WCL. It is located in the northwest edge of Washington, D.C., near the Maryland state line, just twenty minutes from the White House. WCL is the first law school in the world founded by women, Ellen Spencer Mussey and Emma Gillett; the first to have a woman dean; and the first to graduate an all-female law school class. Male enrollment at WCL began as early as 1897.
About Innovative Interfaces
For over 25 years, Innovative Interfaces has dedicated its energies to meeting the needs of libraries and the challenges of library automation. The company has fulfilled this mission with first-rate services and products such as the Millennium integrated library platform, the INN-Reach direct consortia borrowing solution, Electronic Resource Management, and the Encore discovery services platform. Today, thousands of libraries of all types in over 40 countries rely on Innovative's products, services, and support. The company is located in Emeryville, California with offices around the world.
