Transferring From Paper To Digital

Online CD-ROM Patent Office Pioneered by Netherlands

New Strides in Electronic Publishing & Retrieval

The days of waiting for a shipment of books or wading through musty archives for blueprints may soon be over. With the latest innovations, publishers can "ship" finished manuscripts directly to the end user and inventors can search patent libraries electronically. What once was available only at one location is now accessible globally. MWT has found examples of these that may highlight new possibilities for your business:

Transferring From Paper To Digital

Converting from paper-based content to electronic media can cause headaches, even for the biggest companies with large staffs. But electronic publishing software concern Infocon America said it will introduce a program that will not only help with the conversion process, but with enhancing, editing, archiving, and even selling electronic versions of publications.

What’s more, the new software works on Windows, Macintosh, and even Unix-equipped personal computers (PCs), Infocon said.

The new "InfoLink Publishing Enhancement Software" program will cause a "paradigm shift in the publishing industry," Infocon America officials said. Specific target markets for the new software include newspapers, college textbook companies, individual businesses, and the newsletter segment of the publishing industry.

After converting the paper-based content into digital information, InfoLink outputs the results in Adobe’s Post-Script format so that the publisher can then enhance, edit, archive, secure, sell and distribute publications by downloading them to the customer over the Internet, using "push" technology, or on disc.

Infocon will make its money through software licenses to publishers, as well as licensing royalties from publishers on all electronic publications sold using the Infocon software. Infocon America is also creating marketing and distribution relationships with major online book and software distributors on behalf of its publisher partners to increase sales of electronic publications.

On the user viewing side, Infocon America will sell EasyView and EasyView Extreme software for electronic viewing of its converted documents. The EasyView line will use Adobe’s Acrobat Reader and Exchange software, and will be provided to users at little or no cost by publishers.

With the entire system, publishers can electronically deliver enhanced publications to end-user customers on their hard-drive or intranet, for fast, easy access at any time via "push," Infocon said.

Several major publishers, to be announced within thirty days, have already entered into multi-year strategic alliances with Infocon America in advance of releasing the software said Infocon America Chief Executive Officer Mark Hartsell.

"Publishers are really looking for an easy, end-to-end system for electronic publishing," Hartsell said. This is the first end-to-end electronic publishing service Hartsell knows about. While Adobe’s Acrobat system performs a "subset" of what the InfoLink/EasyView system does, Infocon’s products "enhance" Adobe’s offerings, he said.

Infocon America’s product is currently in beta testing, and is being installed with some publishers. The system will then see an initial release in January, with a wider release coming in March.

The system will be on display at the Adobe booth at the Seybold show in October.

(Contact: Mark Hartsell, 714-721-6662)

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Online CD-ROM Patent Office Pioneered by Netherlands

The Netherlands Industrial Property Office (NIPO) has become one of the first government departments in Europe to switch to offering its information online to people and businesses in the Netherlands.

According to NIPO officials, the office currently holds patent information on 4,500 CD-ROMs — a figure which increases by around 900 CD-ROMs each year. There is only one location and just eight workstations, and this has created major problems for people and organizations trying to research patent information.

Additionally, NIPO receives extensive paperwork which has to be manually sorted and accessed and had estimated that it would have run out of space for paper storage by the year 1999.

Because of this, IBM is working with the NIPO on a European pilot project that solves the problem of storing and accessing patent information. The result is an application that stores patent information on CD-ROM "jukeboxes" which are linked to the Internet.

This system provides easy storage for a large number of CD-ROMs, while the network environment makes it possible to access and search the collection from other locations.

The project aims to process the four most complex patent collections on CD-ROM out of the existing 25 — this represents some 6,000 disks containing 4 Terabytes of information, officials said.

The ultimate goal, IBM officials claim, is to provide input and access facilities for Dutch end-users to all patent information available on CD-ROM.

The system is claimed to offer further development possibilities such as supplying image retrieval, linking to other database systems, incorporating additional data (such as international patents), and translating automatically from English to Japanese, German and French.

In addition to overcoming the physical challenge of storing information, the new system will also do the searching and can be easily updated as new information arrives. Through the Internet, information can be accessed by a much wider user base from remote locations.

(Contact: Jacques Smeets, IBM Netherlands +31-20-513-5199; E-mail: jacques_smeets@nl.ibm.com)

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