Medialab Solutions is widely recognized as the first company to enter the library marketplace with their vendor-neutral discovery platform, AquaBrowser Library. With the Denver Public Library implementation, AquaBrowser will integrate into the core automation infrastructure, something unmatched in the library industry today. A fluid integration between the library’s AquaBrowser and the ILS patron account will allow patrons to place multiple holds simultaneously, cancel holds, review their account activities, renew materials, and much more.

Michelle Jeske, Manager of Web Information Services and Community Technology Center at Denver Public Library said “The Denver Public Library thoroughly researched other integrated search systems before determining that AquaBrowser could provide everything we wanted. Bringing together the discovery tool for our catalog with our reviews, integrating it into our website, and linking to the patron account will offer a powerful experience. We look forward to working with the innovative AquaBrowser team to provide elegant, intuitive and inspiring services for our customers.”

My Discoveries^TM, the AquaBrowser social library experience, will allow Denver Public Library users to add tags, ratings and reviews about materials. Patrons and library staff may create private or public lists, and the public lists are shared globally with all users of AquaBrowser Library. Users will have the option of authenticating and signing in to My Discoveries with their patron account information.

Bas Zwaan CEO of Medialab Solutions said, “We are thrilled to be working with the innovative staff at Denver Public Library. AquaBrowser will be maximized as the one-stop shop for all search and patron activities, creating a delightful experience for the library’s users.”

New academic libraries that selected AquaBrowser recently include Skidmore College, Fort Hayes State University, Appalachian State University, DeVry University (Arlington VA), University of Colorado Law Library and University of Western Sydney in Australia.

AquaBrowser Library with My Discoveries for Academic Libraries includes AquaBrowser Library, My Discoveries social networking experience, an integrated webcrawler for the university or library website, authority control file integration and federated searching integration. Since March 2008, it has been sold to academic libraries in North America exclusively by Serials Solutions.

Academic libraries are choosing AquaBrowser to integrate their collections, data sources and websites in one simple, intuitive and powerful interface. AquaBrowser is a proven, vendor-neutral discovery platformthat works with any integrated library system (ILS). Libraries can implement AquaBrowser with any ILS and then migrate it easily if and when they choose a new ILS system, including any open source ones.

Bas Zwaan CEO of Medialab Solutions said, “We are delighted with the AquaBrowser success Serials Solutions is having with university libraries. The AquaBrowser Library with My Discoveries package for academic libraries is a wonderful example of how a library can take easy steps to maximize information access across campus for students and faculty. It’s wonderful to see so many new educational organizations discovering the value in our product.”

Jane Burke, Vice President and General Manager of Serials Solutions commented “Users want a single search across all the library’s resources. AquaBrowser with integrated federated search offers a great user experience with the broadest results. “

• in the Bowker Booth #1300
• in the Serials Solutions Booth #1625

DENVER, CO, May 12, 2007 - The Prairie Area Library System (PALS), a multi-type regional library system in northern Illinois and eastern Iowa, has chosen AquaBrowser Library^TM with MyDiscoveries®. AquaBrowser Library is recognized globally as the only search and discovery system exclusively dedicated to providing visually-represented and faceted search solutions for libraries.

PALS will integrate Serials Solutions 360 Search and Syndetic’s Indexed Content Enrichment (ICE) into their AquaBrowser Library with My Discoveries, making it a rich universal search and discovery system with social networking for the 1.9 million citizens they serve. PALS was formed in July 2004 by the merger of the former Heritage Trail, Northern Illinois, and River Bend Library Systems. It encompasses an automated consortium of 90 online and 111 union library catalogs, serving 374 members in 26 counties and 184 communities.

Paul Mills, Director of Technology Servies for the Prarie Area Library System stated, “PrairieCat is very excited to implement a product that will bring together all the disparate resources our multi-type consortium has to offer in a single, easy to use web interface. We are looking forward to working with AquaBrowser to make their product into an exceptional service for our customers.”

My Discoveries^TM, the AquaBrowser social library experience, will allow PALS users to add tags, ratings and reviews about materials. Patrons, faculty and library staff may create private or public lists, and the public lists are shared globally with all users of AquaBrowser Library. To get the most out of the tagging capability, PALS will pre-populate their catalog with over 21 million LibraryThing tags.

Bas Zwaan CEO of Medialab Solutions said, “PrairieCat is a large consortium of many different types and sizes of libraries and a perfect match for AquaBrowser. AquaBrowser will make information from various resources available via one search interface. Adding the 360 Search option and My Discoveries is a wonderful example of how a library system can take simple steps that offer a huge payoff for their communities. We are delighted to add the PALS members to the thousands of libraries around the globe benefitting from AquaBrowser.”

The University of Pittsburgh joins the growing community of 26 academic AquaBrowser libraries in the U.S, which includes the University of Chicago, Oklahoma State University and another recent customer, Skidmore College in New York.  AquaBrowser Library is the only search and discovery system exclusively dedicated to providing visual, faceted search solutions for libraries using any Integrated Library System, including open source ones.

Dr. Rush Miller, Hillman University Librarian and Director of ULS, explained their selection of AquaBrowser:   “The ULS looked at several other integrated search systems before choosing AquaBrowser. Three things set AquaBrowser apart for us: first, its unparalleled ability to act as a true discovery tool, exposing users via the word cloud and facets to items they didn’t even know they wanted or knew we had. Second, AquaBrowser’s ability to elegantly bring together local and remote, print and electronic, and to present them all in an interface that is simple and usable yet extremely powerful. Finally, we are extremely impressed with AquaBrowser’s extensible and flexible platform and are looking at integrating many resources and services in AquaBrowser. Our goal is to create a system that not only meets but exceeds users’ expectations of what a modern web search environment should be, and we are confident that AquaBrowser is a ready partner in helping us achieve this goal.”

With AquaBrowser Library, faculty, students, staff, administrators, and researchers will be able to simultaneously search the library’s 5.3 million volumes, 57,000 journals, 170,000 eBooks, the University’s web site, the ULS digital repository and thousands of subscription databases.   AquaBrowser Library will also integrate closely with the ULS Voyager integrated library system for patron account management functionality.

“We are delighted to add the University of Pittsburg to the growing list of academic institutions that are choosing AquaBrowser,” said Bastiaan Zwaan, CEO of Medialab Solutions. “AquaBrowser will maximize the accessibility and find-ability of the University’s content, making great use of all that the ULS offers through one search interface.  It’s wonderful to see another prestigious educational organization discover the value in our product.”

The proposal has been undersigned by:

1. Talis
2. Ex Libris
3. LibLime
4. BiblioCommons
5. SirsiDynix
6. Polaris Library Systems
7. VTLS
8. California Digital Library
9. OCLC
10. AquaBrowser

Whether other vendors will follow suit in declaring friendship on open interaction, remains to be seen. In the meantime, and independently of this, you can rest assured we’re continuing to do what we do well: connect to any ILS out there.

You can find the presentation video and slides on the code4lib site.

Serials Solutions is pleased to announce that it now represents the AquaBrowser Library® unified discovery interface with MyDiscoveries™ social library experience. Serials Solutions has exclusive reseller rights to the academic market in North America. This alliance leverages the superior search and interface technology developed by MediaLab Solutions BV of the Netherlands combined with the sales and marketing expertise of Serials Solutions. AquaBrowser Library can be installed quickly and already is implemented at more than 200 libraries worldwide.

“By representing AquaBrowser Library, Serials Solutions is able to provide libraries with a unified experience for search, discovery, social networking and personalization,” says Harry Kaplanian, Director of Product Management at Serials Solutions. “It takes advantage of our competencies and experience with e-resources and federated search, and enables us to help libraries continue to position themselves as the best source of quality content for the research experience.”

AquaBrowser Library with MyDiscoveries provides a powerful research experience that combines the best of search and discovery with the benefits of social networking in one interface. The AquaBrowser Library unified discovery interface gives patrons the ability to search all indexed content with a single query, regardless of format or where the content is located within the library. Search results are simultaneously ranked by relevance and visualized using word clouds that provide opportunities for further exploration. These results can be further refined using faceted navigation.

The integrated My Discoveries social library experience provides both personalization and social networking features. Personalization features enable patrons to customize their experience and save their results. Social networking features enable patrons to share tags, groups, and reviews. My Discoveries shares millions of tags and reviews with the online LibraryThing cataloging community to further enhance the patron experience.

“AquaBrowser Library makes searching the catalog as easy as searching the Internet, but also transforms the search experience in the library into an adventure comparable with ‘browsing the shelves.’ It does this while still providing easy and exact searches,” says Taco Ekkel, Director of Development for AquaBrowser.

AquaBrowser Library is a proven, easy-to-implement system that is currently operating at more than 200 institutions worldwide and in universities across the United States, including the University of Chicago and Oklahoma State Stillwater Library.

AquaBrowser technology seamlessly integrates with any Integrated Library System (ILS), federated search engine such as Serials Solutions 360 Search and WebFeat, digital repositories, Web sites, and any other resource with associated text or metadata that can be indexed.

MarkLogic Server is an XML content platform on which partners and customers build
information access and delivery solutions used by publishers, government agencies, and
other large enterprises to accelerate the creation of content applications.

AquaBrowser Library is the world leader in library search, providing a platform
exclusively dedicated to providing visual faceted search solutions for libraries. The
product seamlessly integrates with any major library system, opening up both the library
catalog and any other information source.

Now customers can use AquaBrowser as an integrated search and discovery interface on
top of MarkLogic, resulting in faster time to delivery of a custom built content
application. By combining MarkLogic and AquaBrowser, customers that have or want to
build a search and discovery application, or anyone who publishes large collections of
scholarly work that needs to be searched, for example, medical databases and reference
materials will now benefit from a more powerful search and retrieval experience.

“We’re very happy to partner with Mark Logic to leverage their world class XML and
XQuery-based content repository,” said Taco Ekkel, director of development at Medialab
Solutions. “Customers can use MarkLogic and AquaBrowser to quickly search through
huge content indexes from the intuitive AquaBrowser interface.”

“We’re pleased to partner with Medialab, a division of our customer Bowker,” said
Andy Feit, senior vice president of marketing at Mark Logic Corporation. “Working
together we will offer the publishing market a state-of-the-art search and discovery
interface that helps them more quickly build and deploy custom content applications and
enables users richer faceted navigation of their content.”

The staggering growth started in the Autumn 2006 academic term, and continued through the Spring and Summer periods, following the library’s adoption of AquaBrowser, the leading visual faceted search platform for libraries around the world. AquaBrowser was created by Medialab Solutions, an Amsterdam-based company that was acquired by Bowker earlier this year.

“Working with Bowker and Medialab, we have been able to revolutionize the level of service that we can offer to our library users,” said Thomas Butler, library operations manager for the Croydon College Library. “Our experience of using AquaBrowser – and, more importantly, our users’ experience – has been excellent, with students and staff finding the system very easy to use and navigate.”

According to Butler, Croydon is currently working with Medialab on a variety of Web 2.0 offerings that will further enhance their online services and create an even more personalized user experience for library patrons.

“We are delighted to partner with the Croydon College Library and are gratified that the implementation of our visual AquaBrowser search and discovery experience has resulted in such a substantial boost in the volume of usage of the library’s services,” said Bastiaan Zwaan, CEO of Medialab. “We look forward to working closely with Croydon’s staff in the coming months as we introduce some exciting new features and functionality to the AquaBrowser platform, such as the integration of Bowker’s Syndetics ICE, a powerful tool to search all Syndetics content on a library’s online catalogs.”