Blacksburg, VA - VTLS today announced the release of a new “open source” product called VORTEX. The product is an add-on to VIRTUA systems and is designed to help libraries expose their MARC based records to OAI harvesters used in building specialized databases of information about resources, thus making their libraries recognized leaders in resource sharing initiatives.

The technology of the Open Archives Initiative's Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) allows for the discovery of distributed resources by creating a simple framework for harvesting metadata about objects. Typically, services harvest this metadata from multiple resources to create specialized databases that will be searched by users. VORTEX makes library databases harvestable to those who wish to build such databases by enabling existing databases to comply with Open Archives Initiative's Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).

VORTEX features include: OAI-PMH compliance, UNICODE UTF-8 encoding, support of three metadata schemes including: Dublin Core, MARC 21 and MODS. The product also supports selective harvesting and flow control.

“VTLS continues our leadership role in the open source initiative among ILS vendors by announcing VORTEX. This product delivers a visionary solution to the challenge of reaching more patrons with more information than ever before.” said Carl Grant, President & COO of VTLS, “Our customers, as VORTEX users will be on the leading edge of technology in resource sharing and coordinated collection work as well as in the adoption of open source software.”

“We have installed Vortex and it's very easy to use!” said Benoit Erken, Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium, one of the beta testing sites, “The configuration menu is very clear and it's fast to get it working and it's easy to manage.

About VTLS Inc.

VTLS Inc. (www.vtls.com) is a leading global company that creates and provides visionary technology in library solutions. We have three distinctive divisions that provide these solutions to a diverse customer base of more than 900 libraries in over 32 countries. Our VIRTUA division remains focused on ILS solutions, our VTRAX division focuses on RFID type technologies through our partnership with Tagsys and our Digital Asset Creation & Management division provides cutting edge software and services for Digital Libraries. VTLS is also one of the few ISO 9001 quality certified companies within the library industry.