Metalib is a product that we've purchased from ExLibris (the same vendor that provides ALEPH & SFX)

1.Metalib makes it possible to conduct simultaneous searches what's known as a "federated search" in databases from vendors that publish our subscription databases and e-journals. It's a database that stores and provides connection information for each database, using either Z39.50 or custom XML connection files to do the work.

2. Metalib's X-server is the product that allows us to create our own custom interface to Metalib. The X-server makes available XML data from each database that we can use in our custom application to display citation details and links to full text.

3. MANGO (our custom application) which is created with Java Servlets and XSLT. It takes data being returned from our licensed databases via Metalib's X-server (see above) and powers the pages you see when you do a "multi-search" query.