It's now nearly summer 1995, and here for your archives are some snapshots of companies caught in the act of innovation:

The Associated Press
The AP Leaf Preserver, long in the tooth by today's standards, is a transition product.

Its future is tied to the NewsLynx database AP expects to release in Europe this summer and in the United States by late 1995 or early 1996. As with the current Preserver archiving system, the new model will run under UNIX on IBM's RS/6000 server.

Just as current Leaf photo workstations can see archives through a Leaf window, Mac and Windows clients will be able to see the server's news stories, photos and graphics along with the archive though a server window, says Dave Tomlin, the cooperative's technical marketing director.

The key, Tomlin says is PLS (Personal Library Software), "a dominant player in the library software system market."

"They'll add a very powerful text search capability as well as eventual access to sound and video," he said.

Also on tap is World-Wide Web access, Tomlin says, both for reporters and as a means to tap into the cybermarket for member newspapers.

Not quite vaporware, the new software was demoed at Digital '95 in March and will be shown again at NEXPO '95 in Atlanta to keep members' interests piqued.

Sun clients also are available, should you have a few SPARCstations lying around. ...

Cascade Systems Inc.
You hear it over and over again: When Cascade's MediaSphere product was going through its growing pains, what made it notable was not the product but the attitude.

"We went in there and threw the book at them," said one, "and when we saw it again, the things we wanted fixed had been fixed."

Another said her library staff had raked Cascade over the coals for its weak search engine. The response was not sullen defense, but requests for more information.

The customer-relations seeding by the British-American company may be bearing fruit. Cascade, of Andover, Mass., seems to be the horse to beat in the multimedia database race.

It's on the market with a fully formed database which defines text, graphics, audio, video and Acrobat files as different objects, then throws them into a database structure that treats all objects the same way.

The result, if it survives the rigors of the field, will be a newsroom dream come true: a true multimedia search, the ability to look for one term in text, Acrobat files, photo captions, keywords appended to Freehand graphics -- the works.

The whole thing runs on SPARCstations, with a Sybase database. Mac and Windows clients are at the other end. Still to come is remote ability and TCP/IP connectivity, says Colin Britton, Cascade's product manager.

One of the Cascade advantages is its probabilistic search engine, which takes natural language queries from users and prompts them for more information to narrow the search, avoiding the Boolean swamp entirely.

Another is the early inclusion of Adobe Acrobat into the MediaSphere system. Adobe owns a chunk of Cascade, and it got into developing for Acrobat before Acrobat was cool.

As a result, newspapers now potentially have a way out of the Quark XPress quandary: More and more pages are being "Quarked," but they're a major pain to enter into a text database because enhancers must reconcile the stories on the text editing system with the final Quark version, incorporating changes made in Quark.

But under the Cascade plan, the librarian or editor could just put the pieces that made up the Quark page into a folder, drop the folder into the MediaSphere hopper, and have Cascade automatically distill the Quark page and index everything.

Now, automatically, you have a searchable Quark page, with a thumbnail that can be put on the Web (assuming you really think people will read newspapers that way).

Even if the Acrobat file is never published, it provides a way to link up all the pictures and graphics that made up that page.

For future pagination applications, you'd be looking at a way to distill them in Acrobat -- all your other archiving problems would fade away.

Of course, they'd be replaced by new ones. This may be a new age, but it's the same old newspaper business.

Gannett Media Technologies Inc.
This marketing tool of the media giant is brand new, and among its first offerings will be Digital Collections, a European UNIX-based system that can hold separate text, photo, graphics and hypertext databases, and offer searches across all of them from Macintosh and Windows clients.

The system was tested at Gannett's two newspapers in Rochester, N.Y., and is being installed in 50 Gannett sites this year. By NEXPO it will be available for sale to non-Gannett clients, according to Daniel Zito, president of Cincinnati-based GMTI.

Like others of its kind, Digital Collections makes the whole photo archive available from any Mac on an Ethernet network, and even could be set up to allow newsroomwide access to incoming wire and local pictures.

DC has been in use in Germany and other European sites for some time. One of its unique features has been a workstation that can RIP Quark XPress pages and turn them into rasterized objects from which to build hypertext links.

The links can go to the text database, pictures, or even audio and video.

However, Cascade's use of the far more robust Adobe Acrobat for the same purpose provides easier enhancing, better searching capability and an emerging standard for hypermedia.

Still, DC is scalable from small sites to large, and easy to use. If priced competitively, it could provide a powerful archiving system.

Systems Research and
Applications International
This Arlington, Va.-based firm, whose name only a programmer could love, used to do a lot of government contracts.

Now that the real world has intruded on government, SRA is looking for work elsewhere, notably in the legal field. It also hopes to leverage its expertise in database management in the newspaper industry.

There's reason to believe SRA knows whereof it speaks: The company put together an image database and search engine to create an on-line service called Seymour for Picture Network International, over which clients may browse more than 400,000 archived images.

Now it's coupling Seymour (which SRA calls PhotoFile) with IntelliSearch, a plain-language search engine that can look across multiple databases -- text, photo, graphics -- from one client, and Nametag, an enhancing program, to provide an all-in-one package.

Though it's new on the scene, SRA's communications expertise should make it able to mix and match a wide range of different photo and text databases on networks or through dialup phone lines. Add to that an interface to a World-Wide Web browser, and you could have the Swiss Army knife of database systems.

The acid tests will be speed and interface, and there SRA will need to be a few installations down the road before we can score those exams.

T/ONE Inc.
Developer of the popular Merlin photo archive, Quincy, Mass.-based T/One is kind of standing to the side as the battle royale between the makers of bigger systems shapes up.

Not only does Merlin run under Windows NT (using two 90 MHz Pentia) instead of UNIX, but former AP photographer David Tennenbaum has positioned his firm as a supplier of photo, not multimedia, solutions.

True, Merlin can capture both photos and graphics in its database, and the T/One system can (and will) grow into a catch-all multimedia database, but for now, T/One refuses to stray far from its photo roots.

For example, while the other suppliers were creating systems to be all things to all people, T/One wrote Trax, a photo assignment tracking system that has been undergoing testing at the New York Times.

The Times has thrown its last four years of photo assignments plus its current work into the Trax database, which is another FoxPro application running on the same clients as Merlin.

Editors can call up a daybook view of the whole department. Reporters, assuming they have access, could call up past assignments to get names and phone numbers of sources.

And supervisors, from one terminal, can call up both assignments and printed work to evaluate employees.

If this gets folded into the larger system T/One says it wants to build, then Trax could be just another in a string of concurrently searchable databases.

Ideally, reporters should be part of the photo assigning process and by making the assignment another window on their screens, they can be. But it will take a more inclusive system than T/One now builds to make that happen.

-- John Bryan

The Associated Press,
(212) 621-1720;
Cascade Systems Inc.,
(508) 794-8000, e-mail: malcolm@cascade.com;
Gannett Media Technologies Inc.,
(513) 665-3777;
SRA International Inc.,
(703) 558-2162;
T/One Inc.,
(617) 328-6645, e-mail: 70412.1163@compuserve.com.

Also: Stemming a cascade of problems

From THE COLE PAPERS, June 1995, Copyright © 1995, All Rights Reserved.