TCA Letters to the Editor
Press Release
Title: Ex Libris Primo Responds to Interview by Jane Burke
Date: July 2010
Organization: Ex Libris Group
Letter:
Mr. George Machovec
Managing Editor
The Charleston Advisor
Re: Ex Libris Responds to Jane Burke Interview
Dear Mr. Machovec,
In the April 2010 edition of The Charleston Advisor, Jane Burke, senior vice president of Serials Solutions, discusses discovery solutions in libraries. In addition to describing the Serials Solutions Summon service, Burke portrays competing products, including the Primo discovery and delivery solution from Ex Libris. However, her assertions about Primo and its Primo Central component are unfortunately faulty, and I would like to add my voice to that of Tim Collins, president of EBSCO Publishing, and provide an accurate description of the Ex Libris solution.
In mid-2007, after thoroughly researching end users' needs, Ex Libris launched the Primo discovery and delivery solution, which has already been deployed at close to 300 institutions around the world. As Burke says, a unified search environment is indeed a key to bringing scholars back to the library, and figures obtained from Primo customer sites in the last three years clearly show that the number of library searches at these institutions has gone up considerably while the length of search sessions has significantly decreased - evidence of a much higher success rate.
From the outset, each Primo implementation has contained an index that covers all the materials that the library wants to offer its users, regardless of the type of material or its origin. The Primo index is designed to hold huge amounts of data, and, like any large-scale system such as Google, can be distributed over multiple servers and still operate as a single index. Earlier this year, the Primo Central index of global materials was added to the Primo environment, building on Primo's distributed index node architecture. The Primo Central index, covering all materials that are shared by the global scholarly community, is hosted by Ex Libris in a cloud computing environment and can be seamlessly added to the search scope of every Primo library. As substantiated by our customers who are already offering Primo Central to their users, the search of both global and local materials is extremely fast - taking a fraction of a second - with the results displayed in a single relevance-ranked list in which materials from the library are intelligently blended with global materials in a manner that libraries can customize according to their policies. The extremely rapid search, along with the relevance ranking and the blending of results, is the outcome of Primo Central's just-in-case processing - not, as Burke erroneously asserts, based on federated searching.
Perhaps it is worth noting that federated searching - or, as we typically refer to it, metasearching - was introduced to the library market about ten years ago and provided the only feasible solution at that time for simultaneously searching heterogeneous collections. As Burke says, today's technology makes the creation of large, centralized indexes possible, gradually replacing federated searching. However, not all collections are available yet for harvesting and indexing, for a number of reasons, which include commercial considerations - as Burke mentions in regard to the lack of full coverage of EBSCO databases in Summon - compatibility issues, and other obstacles. Furthermore, the complexity of the scholarly publishing industry is such that more than one technology is required to cover everything, at least until all publishers come on board with the new concept of centralized indexes. Hence, we include in Primo, in addition to the Primo Central index - which covers almost all global library materials - other channels of searching: deep search (just-in-time searching in specific collections, using the collections' APIs); direct linking to the native interface of specific collections; and, if an institution has already deployed a metasearch system, the ability to configure access to specific collections through the metasearch engine, still within the Primo user interface.
Last but not least, I'd like to mention the content that is available through Primo Central. As a neutral force in relation to information providers, and a harvester of scholarly materials only on behalf of our customers, Ex Libris is in a position to work with all primary and secondary publishers and aggregators. A large number of information providers are already on board, and we hope to see all others making their data available unconditionally to the emerging indexes for the benefit of the scholarly community.
As history has shown, multiple solutions arise to address real needs, and each solution has its own characteristics. In terms of discovery solutions, I'm confident that each library, after conducting a thorough evaluation of facts and features, will be able to determine which of the available products best fits the library's mission, needs, policies, and environment.
Nancy Dushkin
Corporate Vice President
Discovery & Delivery Solutions
Ex Libris Group
