More than six months after entering into negotiation with SUNY, the State University of New York, Ex Libris has a signed contract in hand. Concurrent with the negotiations, Ex Libris opened an East Coast office to support the project and other customers In the northeast.
SUNY is a unified system of public higher education institutions with 64 campuses serving nearly 400,000 students. The exact number of systems has not been announced, but all will be linked to create a virtual union catalog.
Ex Libris hopes to complete negotiations with CUNY, the City University of New York, in the near future. If successful, Ex Libris will serve almost all publicly supported academic institutions in the state.
Ex Libris has also announced that Beta testing of its SFX context-sensitive reference linking product is underway at five sites. The institutions (California Institute of Technology, Harvard University Library, Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Vanderbilt University) are making their electronic collections interoperable with SFX. The idea is not only to make searching easier by providing sets of customized links to an extensive collection of information resources and services, but also to provide a uniform and vendor-independent measure of use. In effect, libraries can combine electronic resources from several different systems to function as a cohesive resource.
General release Is planned for fail. The product can be operated independently of other Ex Libris products.
[Contact: Ex Libris (USA) Inc.; telephone: 877-527-1689(toll free); fax: 773-404-5601; Web: www.exlibris-usa.com.]
