PROVO, Utah; June 14, 1999.Ameritech Library Services (ALS) has been awarded a contract by the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, following an extensive evaluation of automation systems that resulted in the selection of ALS' Horizon system to replace the Smithsonian's existing NOTIS system.
Established in 1846, the Smithsonian Institution is a museum and research complex that holds more than 141 million artifacts and specimens for the purposes of exhibition, public education and research in the arts, sciences and history.
The Smithsonian Institution Research Information System (SIRIS) includes the holdings of the Smithsonian Institution's 18 libraries, 16 museums and galleries, and numerous research facilities in the United States and abroad. SIRIS has six catalogs that have very diverse materials and include 1.2 million volumes, 145,000 archival records, 335,000 records that describe American paintings and sculptures, and 127,000 photographic images.
"The Smithsonian's choice of Horizon underscores that it is one of the most flexible and functionally rich systems on the market," said Lana Porter, president of ALS. "The Smithsonian collections are so diverse, they needed a system like Horizon that would allow them to catalog various types of non-Marc data. The Smithsonian also wanted to link different kinds of Marc records to each other and full implementation of our bibliographic linking tags was the perfect solution."
Ameritech Library Services (www.amlibs.com), a subsidiary of Ameritech, is the world leader in library automation systems with installations in more than 5,200 client libraries worldwide. ALS library information management systems meet the needs of research, public, corporate, medical and K-12 school libraries. Headquartered in Utah, ALS has offices in Illinois and Canada and throughout Europe and the Pacific Rim.
Ameritech (NYSE: AIT) serves millions of customers in 50 states and 40 countries. Ameritech provides a full range of communications services including local and long-distance telephone and data, cellular, paging, security, cable TV, Internet and more. One of the world's 100 largest companies, Ameritech (www.ameritech.com) has 70,000 employees, 1 million shareowners and $30 billion in assets.
