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May 2001

University Of Pennsylvania Implements Encompass

Endeavor Information Systems announced today the University of Pennsylvania Library has purchased the ENCompass digital organization and management tool.  A Voyager site since 1996, the University of Pennsylvania Library is the sixth site to implement ENCompass.

"We are looking forward to working with Endeavor and ENCompass," stated Dr.  Paul H. Mosher, Vice Provost and Director of the Library at the University of Pennsylvania.  "Our intent is to separate scholarly information on the web from the commercial spam, and make it possible for students and faculty researchers to find useful information and incorporate it into their work."

Mosher explained why Penn chose ENCompass. Endeavor is offering a way to put it altogether: an integrated library management system and a wonderful overarching layer that integrates discovery. We want to provide one digital library system that enables you to find everything, whether the resources you need are printed and listed in the online catalog, or digital and found on the Web, whether they are library-created, or licensed or shared with other institutions. We want," Mosher said, "a system that works the way the individual scholar wants it to work, not the way programmers think it should."

Endeavor's alignment with Cornell University, another Ivy League institution and the original ENCompass development partner, is also advantageous to the Penn Library. "We are very pleased with what we've seen happen with ENCompass at Cornell," Mosher said. "As an institution, Cornell is a lot like Penn, and its library is a lot like us. That synergy is something we can use ENCompass to leverage." The possible outcomes are numerous in Mosher's view. The alignment with Cornell would aid resource sharing and benefit collection development efforts.  It would also advance the development of shared virtual collections made up of the original and one-of-a-kind resources owned by institutions across the country.  "ENCompass," said Mosher, "will help Penn and others to lower the physical barriers that scholars traditionally have had to hurdle in order to locate and use critical content."

Like many other digital leaders, the University of Pennsylvania Library considered constructing its own digital resource tool. Mosher explained that Penn has put together a strong digital library development team, including a Ph.D.  in computer science and librarians with specialities in web and database technologies. "But," he said, "we felt our strengths would be optimized by working on the kind of overarching solution that ENCompass promises, rather than a series of individual projects devoted to digital library architecture and management. Given the economies of system development and the rapid pace of technological change, we are eager to get a leg up on a superior system for our users."

"We are very proud of the University of Pennsylvania Library, as they were the first of our many Ivy League Voyager customers.  The Penn Library was an integral part of our Voyager OPAC Task Force in 1996, and as they join the prestigious ENCompass customer base, they bring valuable insight into user experiences, now in the digital realm," explained Cindy Miller, Endeavor Director of Product Strategy.

"We are happy to see the Penn Library recognize the vision and reality of ENCompass. They know ENCompass is the only tool to provide an integrated architecture for organizing, indexing, navigating and linking resources— all features today's libraries need to integrate collections seamlessly," said Jane Burke, Endeavor's President and CEO.  "The many benefits of ENCompass--integrated searching for users, accessibility to a multitude of digital and print collections, maximized staff productivity, integration of varied metadata, linking across resources--make it the solid decision for a growing number of libraries with digital visions."

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University of Pennsylvania Library

The University of Pennsylvania Library includes 15 libraries around the Penn campus. The mission of the University of Pennsylvania Digital Library is "to seamlessly integrate digital resources, print and other non-digital resources, and the expertise of our librarian community, into a rich repository of knowledge." The Penn Library is developing a wealth of digital projects, including digital library collections, exhibits, finding aids and virtual facsimiles from the Penn collections. In 2000, the 250th anniversary of the Library, a special project was launched between the Penn Library and the Oxford University Press to make available all newly published history texts via the Web.

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