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Librarians' Internet Index Selects Siderean Software to Improve Access to High Quality Web Content

Posted on: Monday, 26 June 2006, 09:00 CDT

Seamark Navigator Illuminates Hidden Web Content, Enhances Discovery and Provides a High Quality Navigation Experience to Librarians, Academics and Journalists

Today from the American Library Association's 2006 Annual Conference, Siderean Software, a leading provider of standards-based solutions for cost-effectively aggregating, navigating and humanizing digital information, announced Librarians' Internet Index (LII.org) has selected Siderean's navigation software to improve access to its high quality Web content. LII is a publicly-funded Web site and weekly newsletter serving California, Washington state, the nation, and the world. Many thousands of librarians, academics and journalists consider LII a Web site they can trust for finding content on a broad range of topics. With Seamark Navigator 4.0, these users will be able to leverage powerful faceted navigation functionality to facilitate browsing, illuminate hidden content, and enhance discovery to improve their overall search experience on the site.

"One of the key reasons for selecting Siderean's Seamark Navigator was its front-end navigation features," said Karen G. Schneider, director of LII. "By replacing our existing, cumbersome search capabilities with faceted navigation, our growing community of users will be able to quickly and easily browse our vast collection of peer-reviewed content. With more than 10 million hits per month and a repository of 18,000 items categorized in 14 main topics, 300 primary topics, and 5,000 subtopics, we needed a way for people to rapidly browse these collections to improve discovery. We also needed a way to highlight collections and feature new and custom collections. Faceted navigation allows us to illuminate these items. Users also will be able to avoid standard search 'dumps' or result lists, which lead to dead-ends. Instead, Siderean will present results in logical categories to enable users to navigate selections through LII's rich metadata. This is a tremendous benefit to our users."

LII is funded primarily through the Library Services and Technology Act, distributed in California by the State Librarian. Its users rely on the site for quick access to continuously updated information on topics ranging from taxes to tragedies. In addition to serving librarians, academics, journalists and general information consumers through its site, LII also offers a weekly newsletter and e-mail service highlighting the best of new additions and serves a rapidly-growing RSS readership, including more than 19,000 Bloglines users.

Unlike commercial search engines, which provide users with unreliable search results, librarians consider LII to be an invaluable resource when looking for information on the Web because LII's librarians filter the content and give it structure and organization. This has broad appeal because users have a more efficient way of locating quality information compared to plowing through massive searches. By adding navigation features to this rich repository, users will benefit from an ideal partnership that will make this content far more manageable and accessible, making the site even more user-friendly.

"By categorizing and classifying all of our content, we have already given tremendous structure to the unstructured world," added Schneider. "However, without the ability to easily navigate this universe, new information was becoming increasingly harder to find. With many thousands of content subscribers constantly looking for newly added content, we wanted a technology partner that understood the importance of metadata for highlighting these new items. We also wanted a partner that offered navigation for both structured and unstructured content. Siderean can do both, while understanding metadata, enabling us to provide our users with a more intuitive and effective way to explore our universe of content. Finally, we wanted a partner who could grow with us as we add more capabilities such as user tagging, which is definitely on our list of priorities."

"Libraries and related catalogs are full of high-quality metadata," said Avi Rappoport, principal consultant, Search Tools Consulting. "Faceted search results and dynamic browsing expose all that valuable metadata to users, providing significantly better access to information. Siderean is working with LII to pioneer application of these concepts to information catalogs, using open standards and tested interfaces."

"By enabling LII's users to scan all collections for a particular topic to obtain a complete a bird's eye view of what is available and then drilling down to the specific site needed, Siderean is enhancing the navigation experience and making it easier for librarians to do their jobs," said Brian Anderson, vice president of marketing for Siderean. "We look forward to working with LII and growing with the organization as we help them take advantage of additional features we offer, such as authentication and on the fly facet creation, which will help users launch new facets as they navigate collections of information. With Seamark Navigator 4.0, we are packing many Web 2.0 capabilities, better content organization and aggregation, and highly faceted navigation into one powerful yet easy to use solution. Plus, our fast implementation will yield quicker time to value and improved customer satisfaction compared to other products on the market today."

About LII

Librarians' Internet Index is a publicly-funded Web site and weekly newsletter serving California, Washington state, the nation, and the world. Every Thursday morning, LII distributes its free newsletter, New This Week, which features dozens of high-quality Web sites carefully selected, described, and organized by a team of librarians. Topics include current events and issues, holidays and seasons, helpful tools for information users, human interest, and more. Users can subscribe to the newsletter by email or RSS, or read it on the Web. LII has close to 40,000 subscribers for the newsletter, many from its funding states of California and Washington. Users can also search and browse the Web site for the best of the Web. LII has tens of thousands of entries, also maintained by librarians, and organized into 14 main topics and nearly 300 related topics. LII also offers featured collections. These have ranged from The Grapes of Web (a companion to the 2002 California statewide Steinbeck reading program) to such topics as taxes, elections, and September 11.

About Siderean Software

Siderean Software, Inc. helps people quickly view and explore the full scope of enterprise and Web-based information available for better-informed decision making. Going beyond search, Siderean illuminates previously unseen relationships that help users discover new avenues of exploration and "lets you know what you don't know" while navigating from a "bird's-eye" to a "bug's-eye" view. Founded in 2001, Siderean is backed by leading investment firms Clearstone Venture Partners, InnoCal Venture Capital and Red Rock Ventures. For more information about Siderean, please visit www.siderean.com.

Source: Business Wire

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