March 3, 1999

DATAPOINT-FRANCE, our exclusive distributor in France, announces that it has signed up the universities of Pau and of Paris XII-Val de Marne for the licensing and implementation of ALEPH500. Both of these institutions are very young in their present make-up and, with the pending installation of ALEPH, intend to turn their so-called "Common documentation services" into far-ranging, highly modern electronic access sites with connections to national and international library networks.

The university of Pau in the Barn region comprises two campuses (Pau and Bayonne) and serves about 14,000 students. Its three libraries cover an area of some 7,000 square meters. Its collection of documents will attain 300,000 by 2001. Pau University was created by Henri de Navarre, the future king Henri IV, back in 1583. It functioned in an up-and-down fashion until 1848 and was re-instituted in 1946. Today, it offers courses in law, economics, business administration, sciences and free-time education for non-university students.

The university of Paris XII-Val de Marne was created in the 1960s as part of the decentralization drive of the Paris academies. Its campus is spread over eight sites in the eastern suburbs of Paris and includes seven faculties plus eleven professional institutes. It has six main libraries, covering 6,500 square meters and serving about 25,000 students and close to 1,000 staff. Its collections reach close to 200,000 documents, over 2,400 serials and some 200,000 theses on microfilm. Besides the schools of law, political and economic sciences and technology, Paris XII is renowned for its medical faculty and its Henri-Mondor university hospital.

Both institutions are modernizing their library management systems as part of facility improvements and upgrades from heterogeneous modular software components.

This brings to eight the number of ALEPH500 awards to Datapoint-France since the end of 1997, six of which involve prestigious academic libraries, including those of Sorbonne-Nouvelle, Montpellier and Paris X-Nanterre.