Library automation solutions provider Ex Libris Group has announced that Springer Science+Business Media (Springer) and the American Council of Learned Societies Humanities E-Book (HEB) University Press have opted to participate in the Ex Libris Alma Community Zone program. These organisations join other information providers that are already members of the program, among them ProQuest Ebook Library (EBL) and ebrary.
The Alma Community Zone, a major component of the Alma library management solution, includes a central community catalogue that increases librarians' efficiency by streamlining acquisition and cataloguing processes. Under the Alma Community Zone program, Ex Libris loads publishers' MARC records into the central community catalogue, instead of each library loading the records into its local catalogue. As a result, librarians are spared time-consuming processes associated with acquisition, the updating of records, and authority control.
By contributing their metadata to the community catalogue, Springer and HEB will help libraries streamline their acquisition workflows via Alma, and end users will benefit from the ease of discovery of these publishers' collections.
