Ex Libris App Center

Many Ex Libris customers use Tableau Software for business intelligence. Tableau provides a way to visualize data from various sources, and offers special pricing for academic institutions, making it an attractive option for many university libraries. Tableau can connect directly to many databases such as Oracle and SQL Server. To access data from SaaS systems and APIs, Tableau makes available “Web Data Connectors.” These connectors allow Tableau to bring in data from other systems and combine it with other data sources to produce cross-cutting reports.

This Web Data Connector allows customers of Ex Libris products to access data from Ex Libris analytics and make it available in Tableau. The connector is open source and available for everyone.

Documentation for the connector is available, along with a detailed how-to in this presentation. Below is a brief description of the connector. For a detailed how-to on using the web data connector, see this presentation.