PALO ALTO, Calif.--Families and individuals throughout the world will soon have greater online access to information about their ancestors and family histories.
ebrary®, a leading provider of e-content services and technology, today announced that Brigham Young University (BYU) has licensed its technology to locally host portions of the university library's digital collections including genealogical records and art materials. BYU is sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which maintains the world's largest repository of genealogical resources, with approximately 4,500 family history centers in 70 countries. BYU's Harold B. Lee Library is a member of the Association of Research Libraries.
"By licensing the ebrary platform, we will be able to enhance university library patron access and use of the library's digital resources, and for individuals doing genealogical work, the intent is to further improve the family research process," said Robert Murdoch, Assistant University Librarian for Collection Development and Technical Services for Brigham Young University. "ebrary's technology will make it easy for us to submit a variety of documents and objects and instantly turn them into a database that is searchable and integrates with multiple online resources. ebrary's platform also features many research-oriented capabilities such as bookshelves, highlighting and annotating, automatic citations, and InfoTools which enables contextual online searching across multiple sources."
"ebrary is pleased to extend our relationship with Brigham Young University, and we are very honored to work with them on such a fulfilling and important project," said Christopher Warnock, CEO of ebrary. "It is very rewarding to know that our electronic publishing software, the system that we have developed over the last nine years, will be used to help disseminate the historic documents that BYU has collected and digitized. This will help families all over the world better connect with and learn more about their ancestry."
Under terms of the agreement, BYU will be among the first customers for ebrary's standalone licensed product - code named ISIS - that is hosted on the customers' servers, behind their firewalls. ISIS is currently under its last phase of development and is slated to ship in 2008. In addition to providing customers with complete control over their own digitized collections, ISIS will offer the same rich functionality as ebrary's current hosted solution, as follows:
- Full text searching and indexing
- Easy PDF submission
- ebrary InfoToolsT provide contextual linking across multiple online resources
- The ebrary ReaderT streams pages online, eliminating cumbersome document downloads
- Personal bookshelves
- Highlighting and annotating
- Multiple search options
- Copying and printing with an automatic citation and URL hyperlink back to the source
- Reporting tools and usage statistics
In separate press releases issued today, ebrary announced that the University of Toronto and Informa Healthcare have also licensed its platform to distribute their own digitized materials online. The press releases are available at http://www.ebrary.com/corp/newsReleases.jsp.
About BYU
Brigham Young University seeks to develop students of faith, intellect and character who have the skills and the desire to continue learning and to serve others throughout their lives. Established in 1875, the university provides an outstanding education in an atmosphere consistent with the ideals and principles of its sponsor, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
BYU offers courses in 11 colleges, in Continuing Education and Graduate Studies and in three general undergraduate areas of study. Many academic and professional programs are augmented by internships and career-related summer jobs. For fall semester 2006, bachelor's degrees were offered in 188 academic programs, master's degrees in 66, doctorates in 25 and juris doctorates in one. In the 2005-2006 academic school year, BYU awarded 8,261 undergraduate and graduate degrees.
The Harold B. Lee Library provides services, collections, and computers for more than 15,000 BYU students every day. The library contains over 8 million items including 3.3 million books, 27,000 journal titles, 250,000 maps, 3 million microfilms, and more than 1 million photographs and prints. An extensive selection of manuscripts, diaries, photographs, family histories, scholarly publications, books, and art images have been digitized and are available to anyone in the world with an Internet connection at www.lib.byu.edu.
About ebrary (www.ebrary.com)
ebrary® is a leading provider of e-content services and technology. The company helps libraries, publishers, and other organizations disseminate valuable information to end users, while improving their research and document interaction.
The company has developed a flexible e-content platform, which customers may use in a number of different, integrated capacities: ebrary customers may purchase or subscribe to e-books and other content under a variety of pricing and access models, and they may license the ebrary platform to distribute, sell, and market their own content online. All options are delivered using a customizable interface and include the ebrary ReaderT with InfoToolsT software, which enable integration with other resources to provide an economical and efficient way to utilize information.
ebrary currently offers a growing selection of more than 120,000 e-books and other titles from more than 285 leading publishers and aggregators. Founded in 1999, ebrary is privately held and is headquartered in Palo Alto, CA.
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