VTLS Announces VITAL 3.0

Blacksburg, VA - The VITAL product is continuing to maintain its leadership position for repository products throughout the profession with the announcement of VITAL Version 3.0. This major release marks a watershed in functionality for repository products with new modules for web-based repository management, new facilities to aid researchers in resource discovery, new mechanisms to promote the work of individual authors including the ability to report how their content is being used. Features of VITAL also include 'production ready' features for user authentication, creation of access control policies, collection-level exposure to OAI harvesters and much more. Highlighted new functionality in VITAL 3.0 includes:

• Web-based Content Administration - a new restricted access module of the VITAL Access Portal that provides collection building staff with robust functionality for creating and managing objects and empowering administrators with a complete toolset for repository reporting and management. Also includes:

• Object creation, modification, deletion, datastream previewing, collection building, full-version control for content including version roll-back
• Statistics module for collecting repository usage information, configurable to report hits, visitors, downloads, citations exports, links, etc.
• Administrative reporting module to create, save, schedule and run reports against repository content, usage statistics and metadata
• Wiki-style page annotation to quickly add news, links of interest, maintenance notices, etc. for notification to end-users

Highlighting Author Content - Showcase the work of your contributors and provide them with simple ways to direct others to their content including:

• New Author Page displays all repository content by the author with hyperlinks to each work, statistics to show how often works have been viewed and downloaded, and data on how many citations have been gathered
• An easily distributable URL that links to the Author Page which allows authors to distribute the link to their peers with ease through an e-mail footer.
• Works in the repository can be linked directly from an external Web page, such as an author's personal homepage or discipline-level website, and displayed in a citation format.
• Statistics can be displayed on each object screen so that users can see how often a work has been viewed, downloaded, or used to gather a citation.

Highlighting Work Within Collections - Institutions can customize the 'Highlights' section of the VITAL Access Portal to showcase the most accessed content from within pre-defined collections. The ability to define individual schools or research units, journal articles sorted by relevant subjects, or 'spotlighted' collections allow researchers to quickly note the most accessed content from within a particular area of interest.

Automatic notification of new content of interest - Researchers can choose to receive updates automatically regarding new content of interest to them as that content is added to the repository. This is enabled through an RSS feed to the researchers browser, allowing them to see new content by a particular author, works within a particular subject area, or content that meets all qualifications from a unique filtered search that they have performed.

Quick Search Cart for selecting and exporting content citations - Using the new Quick Search feature in the VITAL Access Portal, researchers can select all content of interest from the repository and export metadata associated with those works in standard citation style with one easy process. Users can e-mail the citations as plain text or in a standard format such as EndNote. In addition to standard metadata fields, this feature also includes the export of a persistent identifier for each work, allowing for linking back to the author's work directly from a future citation.

Filter search results using categorized metadata 'facets' - Users of the Access Portal can refine the results of search queries using prevalent metadata from within the resulting repository content. Administrators can configure VITAL to display popular metadata categories such as Author/Creator, Subject, Format Type, and Resource Type. Users will see a ranked listing by occurrence of metadata appropriate to each category. By selecting one of these metadata 'facets', VITAL users are able to further refine their search results to retrieve only the content that they desire to view.

Enhanced browsing of image content - Users of the VITAL Access Portal can choose between viewing the results of repository queries in a list view and an icon view. Using thumbnail representations of image-based content, the new icon view provides an attractive layout of repository content similar to a photographer's 'lightbox'.

User Authentication via LDAP - Institutions need a way to ensure the identity of certain users within the VITAL System. By supporting the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) as a mechanism to authenticate users, VITAL allows sites to use their existing LDAP-based authentication system to manage users, thus reducing the overhead of maintaining separate systems. Authentication is required by users of the Administration Module in VITAL to perform various functions and system administrators have the ability to see users logged into the system and report on user activity.

VITAL customers include National Libraries (National Library of Australia, National Library of Wales and Slovak National Library), universities (Princeton University, University of Delaware, Monash University, Swinburne University, University of New South Wales, University of South Australia and Central Queensland University) and research organizations (Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research).