Vol. 5, No. 9, September 1994

Iota of innovation

Small Israeli company brings amazing archiving innovation to NEXPO

With the sun setting earlier and children chattering about school, it seems a little ludicrous to be discussing that ultimate newspaper summertime activity, NEXPO -- the Newspaper Association of America’s annual technical exposition and conference -- but timing is everything.

What with NEXPO running later this year than ever (June 24-29), here we are almost with frost on the pumpkin and we're still talking about what happened in the heat of Las Vegas.

But to add a little excitement, we've saved the best for last.

Correspondent John Bryan grabbed my arm on NEXPO Tuesday to implore me to get over to the Hyphen Inc. booth. "I've just found the Holy Grail of archiving," he said.

There I found executives from the Israeli firm Iota Industries Ltd., showing a system that allowed you to search through a database of newspaper stories with the result being displayed on-screen as a picture of the actual newspaper page.

Perhaps best of all, the system works with relatively low resolution images of newspaper pages, which would mean that it would not only support pages created on a pagination system but also pages that have been archived already -- on microfilm.

The result would be the ability to index and search a newspaper’s entire published history electronically.

Called Newsware, the Iota product will be distributed worldwide by Hyphen. When grilled about how well Newsware fits with the Hyphen product line, Paul Bond of Hyphen U.K. said, "Hyphen is now in the database business and the Iota product is another database."

A reassuring statement, but Bond neglected to mention that the executive in charge of the Hyphen U.S. operation had left the company just days before (see Hellbox).

But Iota wasn't the only glimmer of innovation we saw in archiving. We came away impressed with all the natural language implementations, including those from DataTimes, Digital Collections, Cascade and Scitex’s P.INK division (though we believe that both Cascade and P.INK are like the early players on Saturday Night Live: Not Ready For Prime Time).

Additionally, we liked the Associated Press’s new AP Server, which isn't archiving, but the other end of the pipe -- it’s a system that would allow newspapers to take in photos, text, audio and video for use in all those newfangled things that promise (maybe) to replace newsprint.

Inside, Correspondent L. Carol Christopher wraps up notes from all her colleagues to discuss the current state of newspaper text and image archives (as in the last issue, our NEXPO coverage required writers to send notes to a rewrite person who pulled each topic together; the signer on each story is that rewrite person.)

Also inside, we mop up the rest of NEXPO, including coverage of editorial front-end systems, display advertising makeup systems, imaging systems, audiotext systems, page transmission systems, ergonomic assistance and services to newspapers.

Certainly one important aspect of looking at NEXPO from such a removed time and place is that the issues and products come into better focus. Despite my skepticism about Hyphen’s marketing capabilities in regards to Iota’s Newsware, reflecting on NEXPO two months later it seems Newsware was the most important product at the show.