Because of the bimonthly updates to SFX, the ‘versioning’ seems to matter a lot less than with other products. Perhaps this is also because the functionality is simple, and stable.

Ex Libris are planning to move to releasing semi-monthly (rather than the current monthly) KB updates (although you can take them when you are ready – you don’t have to take them every fortnight if you don’t want!)

Some other recent and ongoing enhancements are:
A-Z title list improvements
OpenURL 1.0 SAP2 XML
Better linking for conference proceedings (starting with IEEE)
Enhancements to KB data

SFX is now moving beyond just being a ‘link server’, this is being supported by work on:

Support for ANSI/NISO Z39.88-200 (OpenURL 1.0) – SAP2 including multiple Context Objects
Dynamic A-Z list
Citation Linker
KBTools: exports, collection development analysis
Integration with ERM
Strong consortium support
Support for ONIX SOH 1.0 (Onix Serial Online Holdings) – for initial and ongoing subscription maitenance

This last one is something I need to investigate more – but presumably this will allow our suppliers to supply machine readable holdings information which SFX can consume, and use to update our local thresholds – this is potentially incredibly powerful, but I’m a bit wary about the accuracy of supplier data, as in the past it hasn’t always been that good (even though you’d really expect them to know)

The figures for the KB are impressive with almost half a million object portfolios over about 1500 targets. We are also seeing growing numbers of e-book targets – 56 targets, and 360,000 objects.

A real challenge here is how our users access e-books (see my earlier post relating to the possible need for a special interest group for this). If we loaded extensive e-book records into our catalogue, they would swamp our existing catalogue (e.g. EEBO roughly 100,000 records, our catalogue roughly 300,000 records).

I think that probably we would expect our users to access services like EEBO direct, or via MetaLib. However, as Nick pointed out in a comment to a previous post, there is also a move towards buying individual titles – so more like a ‘print’ replacement – in this case, where else are they going to live except the library catalogue?

SFX 4

SFX 4 is on its way (currently slated for Q3 2007), and some highlights include:

Enhancements to the admin interface including task-based wizards which are intuitive and workflow oriented
Further integration with Verde and sharing of KB data
Better integration of print holdings (definitely very interested in this
Improvement of end-user ‘menu’ linking experience
Further international support
Improved management of statistics
Towards KBUpdate ‘on-demand’

Some disappointment here that the integration of print holdings isn’t already here. We saw a presentation (just mentioned again in fact) last year where a library had done it, but by going deep into the SFX code and changing it – which Ex Libris won’t support, and I don’t want to do.