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Ex Libris, a company that provides ebook and other library automation services, has opened a new data center in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

It said cloud services to the book-reading community have been growing, and the company needed to expand its data center operations as a result.

It said its new data center increases the number of Internet service providers it connect to for its digital, print and electronic media provision service.

Ex Libris catalogues full volumes of text. It recently signed with STM publisher Elsevier to make all journal articles from ScienceDirect available on its Ex Libros Primo Central Index.

Hundreds of libraries around the world use this service.

Ex Libros CEO Matti Shem Tov said the libraries are increasingly being pushed towards cloud services, with the evolving needs of students of researchers driving libraries to explore new models in cash-strapped times.

"Libraries are now considering the benefits of hosted services of various kinds, and while some libraries prefer to continue configuring and managing their systems, which may reside elsewhere, other libraries prefer to subscribe to a fully serviced offering in which the provider of the service is responsible for all aspects of the solution," Tov said.

"The addition of these new, hosted modes of operation is also having an impact on Ex Libris. The way in which we design, develop, test, sell, implement, and support our solutions is changing."

Ex Libris did not provide information on the size of its data center but said it had been built to meet high security specifications with four layers of access. It has power built to N+1 redundancy as well as redundant heating, ventilation and air conditioning and meets ISO standards 9001 and ISO/IEC 27001.

Ex Libris Vice President of Cloud Services Uri Livnat said the data center in the Netherlands complements existing data centers in the US, which server more than 1,000 customers.

""This new data center optimizes the provision of cloud-based services to thousands of European customers," Livnat said.

IT will allow for more streamlined upgrades to take place across the service and provide Ex Libris with the ability to scale up using local hardware, and allow for around-the-clock library support, it said.