ePress and Library Platform have signed a three-year agreement that puts the full ePress catalogue inside the discovery layer thousands of public libraries already use every day. For patrons, the change is small and welcome: the magazines and newspapers they borrow now appear in the same search results as everything else in the collection.
One search, one login
Until now, digital periodicals sat in a separate place. A patron looking for coverage of a local election would search the catalogue, find nothing, and never learn that four relevant titles were available two clicks away behind a different login. That gap has closed. Titles are indexed with their metadata intact, and authentication passes through the library card the patron already holds.
Libraries running the integration during the pilot reported a marked increase in first-time periodical readers, concentrated among patrons who had never opened the standalone application at all. That is the population the agreement was designed to reach: not the people who already know what ePress is, but the ones who were never going to go looking.
What libraries need to do
Very little. Institutions already licensing both products can enable the connection from the Library Platform administration console; there is no migration, no re-cataloguing and no change to existing subscriptions. Usage continues to report through ePress Analytics, so the figures a library submits to its funders stay on the same basis as previous years rather than resetting.
For institutions licensing only one of the two, both sales teams can quote the combination. Consortium agreements are being handled case by case over the coming quarter, and existing consortium terms are honoured in full for their remaining duration.
A shared position on access
Both organisations came to this from the same conviction: that the barrier to reading a newspaper should not be knowing which application to open. Fragmentation is a design failure, and it falls hardest on the patrons who are least practised at working around it. Removing one seam is a modest fix, but it is the kind that compounds.
The integration is available now in every market where both products operate. Libraries interested in enabling it should contact their usual account manager, who can confirm licensing and schedule the switch.