28th September 2006, Birmingham, UK. Through an innovative Web Services based solution, University College Dublin (UCD) has successfully integrated their library services into the campus portal – UCD Connect.

The deployment of Talis Keystone has enabled University College Dublin to expose rich functionality from their Talis Library Management System (LMS) as a SOAP Web Service and directly embed this into the campus portal. Integration with SunGard's Luminis portal in conjunction with WebCT's (a Blackboard company) market leading e-learning platform offers students ease of Single Sign On, combined with the simplicity of viewing borrower account summary information. Students have experienced immediate benefits, including the ability to access their library account information, together with email, shared networks and course information within a single student environment – their university portal.

Samantha Drennan, Library IT Manager UCD commented "The university portal is now the primary online working environment for many students. UCD Library's objective is to embed library functionality within the portal and thus improve services to all users. Our investment in Talis Keystone has undoubtedly enhanced the value of our institutional portal."

Nick Kyte, Senior Manager, Product Marketing Talis Information Ltd commented "We are very pleased to see one of the first Talis Keystone implementations go live with UCD. The feedback from students and the library has been very positive. Integration with other applications is already underway including uPortal, due to go live in the very near future. We also look forward to announcing these customer success stories over coming weeks. This is another great example of how Talis and our customers work together to provide new innovative services to the library community."

The Talis Keystone architecture leverages industry standards such as XML and SOAP to enable genuine interoperability between library and institutional systems, and is therefore not dependent on the underlying operating systems or databases employed by different applications. Talis' approach is to empower both institutions and the developer community to deploy Talis Keystone based integrations themselves, by providing the necessary tools and support via the Talis Developer Network (www.talis.com/tdn).

The Talis Keystone – My Account module enables library account details to be supplied directly to other systems. This module comprises the first of a series of scalable and reusable Web Service APIs to be exposed by Talis Keystone. Future modules and discrete Web Service APIs will allow further real-time interoperability between the LMS and other applications such as student registry.

Talis Keystone delivers significant business benefits to libraries seeking a robust and easily deployable integration solution that addresses the need to make their library services more visible throughout the institution.

On Tuesday 24th October, we will be hosting a Product Briefing on Talis Keystone for academic libraries, focusing on how Web Services are enabling interoperability between library and student services. This event will be held at our Birmingham office. For additional information visit www.talis.com/events for more information about Talis Keystone please contact 0870 400 5090.

About Talis

Talis is an established provider of library and information management software to public and academic libraries and has a long history as a technology innovator, a pioneer for open standards, and as a partner for its customers.

Working closely with world standards bodies such as World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, and NISO, ongoing research activities include Web Services, Services Oriented Architectures, RDF based metadata and RSS.

Talis has recently announced a new Talis Library Platform which is an open, extensible, Web 2.0 based software platform which will be the foundation upon which next generation applications will be developed. The Talis Platform incorporates semantic content management, a global collections directory, with a Service Oriented Architecture that enables low cost institutional integration.

Through the Talis Developer Network, Talis welcomes developers to join its development community and build the next generation of applications and services on a shared platform.