Oren Beit-Arie is the Chief Strategy Officer at Ex Libris, and is going to talk about the company’s vision and strategy, and also will talk briefly about a new product – Primo.

Originally a ‘Library’ was a place. Library management was about managing the physical space, and the physical stock – providing access to the physical collection was the challenge.

Ex Libris started in 1980 with the Aleph library system, which was focussed on the challenges of managing physical collections.

However, in recent years, there has been an exponential growth of electronic resources, and now libraries are managing both a physical collection, and electronic resources. Associated with this is a shift from owning to licensing resources for libraries.

Comparing ARL stats of total materials expenditure, and e-resources expenditure, the 11 year compound annual growth rate up to 2004 has been 6.3% for overall expenditure and 30.2% for e-resources. In 2004 e-resources expenditure represted over 30% of total expenditure.

So – this has led to some new challenges/needs:

Linking between web of resources (the appropriate copy problem)
Simultaneous search across disparate collections and systems
Management – new models of acquisition and licensing

And of course (this being a supplier presentation!) Ex Libris had developed systems to help with these problems – SFX, MetaLib and Verde respectively – which have been introduced from 2000 onwards.

Cynicism aside, SFX certainly led the way in terms of OpenURL resolvers. It is also worth noting that all three products are the result of close collaboration with the Ex Libris user community – a strong recommendation for both the company, and the work of the user groups and user community.

There is also an increase in digital assets being created – perhaps this applies especially to the University market, where digitisation of readings, exam papers, pre- and post-prints, archives, and increasingly ‘born digital’ material – all of the above, and learning objects, web pages etc. etc.

Oren proposes that the ‘big picture’ can be split into things ‘under library control’ (probably, but not necessarily, ‘local’), and those ‘not under library control’ – e.g. e-books, e-journals, databases – often licensed resources. Oren also notes that this isn’t really the big picture – this is the ‘library’ picture – if we look at the user, they will be drawing a huge range of information sources and services.

Also, we are now in an environment where many users are also creators (although recent figures indicate that this isn’t a huge percentage)

All this leads Ex Libris to the following strategy:

1 – the end-user: provide a system and services that will enable libraries to expose content and services to users where and when they need it and in the way they expect it

Library content and services should be offered to users in context – so promote interoperability, open interfaces.