About PALSPALS is a program of the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities. PALS provides automated library services to the system's libraries, along with private college, state government, special, public, and school libraries across the state of Minnesota. In addition, PALS provides services in support of online learning, including support of customer relationship management products. Services benefit students, faculty, and staff of the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities, and library staff and patrons throughout the state of Minnesota.
MnPALS
Initiated at Mankato State University in 1978, the name PALS was originally an acronym for Project for Automated Library Systems. Originally a Minnesota State University System undertaking, PALS now serves all of the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities. Services are also provided on a contract basis to private college and university libraries, state government libraries, public libraries, school libraries and special libraries. These make up a significant segment of the MnPALS membership and database.
PALS operates and supports the Aleph automated library system from Ex Libris. The software runs on servers at the central office site in Mankato.
RightNow
PALS provides support and training for customer relationship management software from RightNow Technologies. Services are provided to the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities through an enterprise wide contract, which helps to reduce costs to individual institutions.
RightNow Technologies offers web-based, customer support solutions that allow higher education institutions to provide information to a myriad of customers with limited resources and budget. The RightNow software features dynamic, "self-learning" knowledge base technology that allows new content to be automatically generated, published and categorized. This self-learning technology is the key to keeping the cost and effort of maintaining high-quality service to a minimum.
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