Content area
Full Text
The 2018 ALA Annual Conference and Exhibition in New Orleans afforded attendees with opportunities to network with some of the 17,599 individuals who share their interest in libraries. The geography of the exhibit floor paralleled the ongoing trends in the library technology industry-consolidated companies bringing together growing portfolios of synergistic offerings, plus a rich array of smaller organizations providing boutique services and niche products. A theme of convergence prevails throughout the technology industry, where companies assemble suites of content, resource management, discovery, and workflow tools to address the expanding missions of libraries.
The conference brought together more than 750 companies and organizations in the world's largest exhibition of library-oriented technology. This roundup describes a few of the products that caught my eye. It's not a comprehensive report; there were just too many interesting items on hand to write about them all.
SEEKING SYNERGIES
PROQUEST is a good example of a large company showing convergence and synergy, with its many brands and subsidiaries united within its large island booth. Though well known for its databases, ProQuest has become the leading provider of technology to research and academic libraries through its 2015 acquisition of EX LIBRIS. Its Alma library services platform, used by more than 1,000 academic libraries, provides the foundation for the company's new round of products-Leganto, which integrates library resources into learning management systems, and the Esploro research services platform. Ex Libris announced in June that it had released an early version of Esploro to its development partners, including Lancaster University and the University of Sheffield in the UK, and the University of Oklahoma, University of Miami, and University of Iowa in the US. Other items featured at the ProQuest booth included OASIS, Syndetics Unbound, RefWorks, and Ebook Central.
EBSCO INFORMATION SERVICES likewise promoted its broad portfolio of content and discovery products. In addition to the core EBSCOhost databases, the company featured its EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS), the Full Text Finder resource management tools, and the GOBI acquisitions platform. EBSCO's approach to synergies between content and resource management is based on interoperability and support of open source alternatives. The company has not acquired or developed its own integrated library system (ILS) or library services platform (LSP), but it partners with dozens of other companies to...