University of Mary Washington Selects VITAL

Blacksburg, VA - VTLS is proud to announce that the University of Mary Washington has signed a contract for the installation of VITAL, as the basis of their repository services on campus.

The University of Mary Washington, located in Fredericksburg, Virginia has been earning high marks. In its 2006 edition, The Fiske Guide to Colleges listed UMW as one of the nation's 300 best colleges and universities, stating "Mary Washington has gained a reputation as one of the premium public liberal arts colleges in the country." Barron's Profiles of American Colleges' 2007 edition placed Mary Washington in its "highly competitive" category, designating the University as one of the 171 top colleges and universities in the nation in terms of academic selectivity.

When selecting VITAL, the University of Mary Washington team narrowed the options down to a leading open source repository solution and VITAL, which is based on FEDORA™, another leading open source repository solution. After conducting a thorough analysis, they concluded that VITAL best met the needs of their rapidly growing university.

"VITAL has been adopted by some of the largest, leading research academic institutions around the world." said Vinod Chachra, President & CEO of VTLS. "Now people are seeing the products. suitability for the smaller, leading academic institutions. We're looking forward to showcasing the University's installation of VITAL to other similar institutions."

"VITAL offered us the important combination of being based on a scalable open source solution, while giving us sophisticated workflow and metadata handling, all of it backed by a commercial vendor," said Dr. LeRoy Strohl, Director of the Library at the University of Mary Washington.