Ex Libris, a ProQuest company, has announced that the Ex Libris Alma® library services platform has been selected by the National Institute of Informatics (NII) in Japan, an interuniversity institute that promotes research in information-related areas. The decision was based on strategies defined in the 2019 Vision on Future Scholarly Information Systems, prepared by Japan’s Future Scholarly Information Systems Committee under the auspices of the Council for Promoting Collaboration between University Libraries and the National Institute of Informatics.
The adoption of the Alma platform is part of an effort to create a new library system and network that includes support for digitized academic materials (such as electronic journals and electronic books) and the current library systems at Japan’s universities. With the Ex Libris Alma platform in place, NII will be supporting the Japan Alliance of University Library Consortia for E-Resources (JUSTICE) with an electronic resource management service.
As a result, JUSTICE will be able to easily share publishers’ and academic societies’ title lists and e-resource license terms with consortial member libraries. More important, NII’s move to Alma services will connect the library systems of consortium members, enabling students, researchers, and librarians to find holdings of electronic resources at other universities. Because the Alma system is a library service platform (LSP), it can connect individual Alma users with the NII JUSTICE Alma implementation to manage all the print, electronic, and digital resources. The JUSTICE electronic resource management service is scheduled to go live in the second quarter of 2022.
The implementation is part of NII’s next NACSIS-CAT/ILL catalog information service, which will be provided through Kinokuniya Co., Ltd., as a contractor.
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