University of Toronto selects Endeavor's ENCompass

Citation

(2002), "University of Toronto selects Endeavor's ENCompass", Program: electronic library and information systems, Vol. 36 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/prog.2002.28036cab.005

University of Toronto selects Endeavor's ENCompass

University of Toronto selects Endeavor's ENCompass

Endeavor Information Systems has announced that the University of Toronto Library has selected the ENCompass digital management system for managing thousands of e-journals, federated searching of commercial content, managing digital collections and the integration of campus resources. ENCompass will serve the University of Toronto community and, through partnerships, researchers at other universities in Ontario and across Canada.

"Clearly Endeavor has a good history on the traditional side of integrated library systems, and looking at the technological underpinnings of ENCompass, we have considerable confidence in the project," stated Marshall Clinton, Director of Information Technology Services for the University of Toronto Library. He noted the growth of ENCompass is parallel to the University of Toronto's goals. "We've seen the evolution of thinking in what ENCompass is and the degree of similarity in what we are planning."

"ENCompass is a good fit with our goal of attaining a broad-based system that could move forward in the integration of resources," explained Marshall Clinton, "accessing citations, articles, footnotes, inter-content linking – LinkFinderPlus in ENCompass provides a more open framework for working with a wide variety of publishers and vendors. The real key to integration is the integration of these resources into the curriculum – ENCompass is going to be a sufficiently open and flexible platform to do that."

Clinton illustrated the University of Toronto Library's capabilities of allowing faculty and students to pull citations and links to content into its "my library" framework. Faculty may then integrate their "libraries" into curriculum guides or "publish" them as part of the syllabus. He expects that this capability will be extended through ENCompass. "Integration of library resources – both print and electronic – into the curriculum is the key," Clinton said, noting the possibilities are endless with ENCompass. "It's only limited by the imagination of the person using the materials."

Clinton explained the ENCompass goals for the University of Toronto Library include providing an article-level database integration for access to bibliographic databases. Federated searching in ENCompass will provide access to a wide scope of electronic information sources and draw all of those resources into a unified framework. Today the Library has licensed access to over 13,000 electronic journals. Of these, all titles from Academic Press, Elsevier Science, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Springer and Wiley are now loaded locally and will be accessed through ENCompass. It is expected that the journals from other publishers and the metadata from others will also be loaded. Through its federated search capabilities, ENCompass will become a uniform front-end to hundreds of index and abstract databases now accessed through a variety of systems.

Locally digitised collections will also be mounted in ENCompass in a variety of architectures. "ENCompass gives us that unifying framework that still has the flexibility to create external structures about data," Clinton explained. "Too often local collections are hidden away and do not appear in the traditional search engine – these are really hidden treasures. ENCompass extends the vision of the library to show not only our resources but also external resources – information from other libraries as well as publishers."

"As one of the top research libraries in North America, the University of Toronto has specific needs to reach a very large community; the scalability of ENCompass is the correct match for the scope and imagination of the University of Toronto's Library's digital goals," said Jane Burke, Endeavor's President and CEO. "The University of Toronto Library will take full advantage of all ENCompass has to offer – e-content access and management, linking across resources, digital collection management and access – all with federated searching an easy to understand interface for both the library staff and researchers."

Serving the largest university in Canada with seven major libraries, eight teaching hospital libraries and 40 college, faculty and department libraries, the University of Toronto Library ranks in the top three academic research libraries in North America. The Library's mission is to foster research and knowledge for the University of Toronto students, plus "provide innovative services and comprehensive access to information founded upon our developing resources as one of the leading research libraries in the world".

ENCompass is a solution for single-search access to commercial content, digital collections and the local OPAC – plus linking via LinkFinderPlus, the solution for providing seamless access to all library information and relevant services across platforms, journals and publishers, including the latest abstracts, full text of print, links to Internet search engines, links to online booksellers and links to review information. ENCompass is the most comprehensive of Endeavor's ENCompass Solutions offerings, which includes ENCompass for Resource Access and ENCompass for Digital Collections, specific system offerings that address concentrated e-content or digital content needs. LinkFinderPlus is available as an additional system to accompany either ENCompass for Resource Access for ENCompass or Digital Collections.

Endeavor Information Systems, based in Des Plaines, Illinois, was founded in September 1994. Over 900 academic and research libraries of every size have chosen Endeavor's Voyager integrated library system. Endeavor offers a complete line of library solutions for traditional and digital collections.

For further information please contact: Endeavor Information Systems Inc., 2200 E. Devon Ave., Suite 382 Des Plaines, IL 60018 4505, USA. E-mail: info@endinfosys.com URL: www.endinfosys.com