Ex Libris and Endeavor Merge
Posted On Nov 21 2006Francisco Partners, the company that bought Ex Libris Corporation this year, has announced that it will also purchase Endeavor Information Systems from Reed Elsevier. The two companies will be merged and run under the Ex Libris name and senior management, led by Matti Shem Tov. In a press release issued today (pdf), Shem Tov states, “Leveraging the extensive experience and technologies as well as the dedicated, skilled staff of both companies, we will now be even better equipped to provide our customers with next-generation library products. We welcome Endeavor’s customers to the Ex Libris community and, with this important acquisition, …
Endings and Beginnings
Posted On Oct 4 2006I got an e-mail today from the RedLightGreen team at RLG. RedLightGreen provided inspiration and set the bar in many respects long before anyone had uttered the words “next generation catalog.” The much-lauded interface to the research union catalog is fading away in the wake of the OCLC RLG merger. Fortunately, this is not as much a deprecation as it is a passing of the baton to WorldCat.org, which launched in beta status last month. WorldCat includes both the faceted navigation and “Editions” feature (tying like titles together into a single record display) made popular by RedLightGreen. The second mouse …
More Meta
Posted On Sep 29 2006After spending a couple years of my professional life trying to improve the state of metasearch (federated search, if you prefer), I took a little break from being so passionate about the subject. But, like e-books, it’s one of those library technologies that I just can’t seem to shake an interest in. And it seems like librarians are loosening up a bit and letting patron demands and satisfaction with “good enough” search results replace an entrenched skepticism about the adequacy of metasearch. It’s still amusing to note that it took metasearch for librarians to beatify content providers’ native interfaces, which …