Content area
Full Text
Abstract
Publicly released in mid-2010, Primo Central extends the Primo next generation discovery layer, released by Ex Libris several years earlier. This chapter provides a brief history, overview, and a few insights into the future development path of Primo Central, describes the local and remote content associated with Primo Central, and highlights some of the features, functionality, and flexibility associated with the Primo Central interface.
Overview
Ex Libris began development of its next-generation discovery layer, Primo, in 2005, with official public release occurring in 2007; Primo version 3 was released in spring 2010. Hundreds of libraries worldwide have implemented Primo. The Primo discovery platform harvests and indexes local library collections, such as bibliographic records, digital collection materials, and items within institutional repositories, and provides a common interface for discovery of these materials. In addition, Primo can be configured to search remote repository indexes and blend the library's local collections with the remote index results. Primo Central, Ex Libri s's Web scale discovery component, was officially released in mid-2010. Primo Central extends the base Primo discovery experience by also searching a large preharvested central index of article-level content from a variety of publishers and aggregators. For the remainder of this chapter, Primo Central and Primo will be used interchangeably; many of the points discussed apply equally to the Primo next-generation discovery layer with or without the Primo Central service. Given that Primo Central is an extension of Primo, the interface and many of the features are the same. At the time of this writing, late summer 2010, approximately fifty customers have signed on as subscribers to the Primo Central service, with several customers already live on Primo Central. While academic libraries make up the large proportion of customers, public library customers are also present and will likely become more numerous in the future. For example, Ex Libris recently announced that the National Library of Finland, representing various library types, research institutes, archives, and museums, had chosen the Primo/Primo Central platform.
The Primo discovery layer can be hosted by Ex Libris or the local library; in either case, the central, preaggregated index associated with Primo Central is offered as a managed service and hosted by Ex Libris in a cloud environment. Primo Central is offered as...