Talis Information
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| Private | |
| Industry | Computer software |
| Founded | 1969 |
| Headquarters | Birmingham, England |
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Key people
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| Website | www |
Talis Group Ltd. is a software company based in Birmingham, England that develops software for Higher Education. They were previously involved in development of library management software and a Semantic Web application platform. In 2005 Talis was voted one of the top ICT Employers in the United Kingdom.
In 1969 a number of libraries founded a small co-operative project, based in Birmingham, to provide services that would help the libraries become more efficient. The project was known as the Birmingham Libraries Co-operative Mechanisation Project, or BLCMP, and included the library of the University of Birmingham. At this time the concept of library automation was so new that the term mechanisation was often used in its place.
BLCMP began a co-operative catalogue of bibliographic data at the start of its work, a database that now contains many millions of records. For this an adaptation of UKMARC coding was used. This shared approach to creating metadata is the forefather of later, Internet-based, community ventures such as IMDb, Freebase and others. But this was back in 1969 when shipping this data around involved printing cards and putting boxes on trucks. More libraries became members of BLCMP, e.g. many of the academic libraries of Manchester and Salford.
BLCMP moved into using microfiche and later IBM mainframes with dedicated terminals at libraries in the mid-seventies and was one of the first library automation vendors to provide a GUI on top of Microsoft Windows to provide a better interface for end-users. The Integrated Library System was first called Talis after 'The Automated Library And Information System. Talis became the name of the company during re-structuring and the ILS became known as Alto. In 1995 Talis was the first library systems vendor to produce a web enabled public access catalogue.
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