D.C. Trotting – Handing Out Award at CIL

Well, Andy isn’t the only globe trotting Deep Web Technologies executive. In this blog post I’d like to tell you about my latest trip, one a bit closer to home, to our nation’s capital. I spent most of last week (April 12 – 15) in the D.C. area at the Computers in Libraries Conference in Crystal City and visiting with customers and prospective customers.

On Monday morning I attended a very good talk – Trends in Search & Search Engines (link to notes and references on presentation. Presentation itself is not publicly available.) by Joan Goodbody, Laura Hjerpe and Lynda Citro. Joan is a search strategy expert at the US Patent and Trademark Office. Over the last 6 months Joan has become a user and fan of a number of our public “deep web” search engines such as Science.gov, WorldWideScience.org and Biznar.com and has had a number of email exchanges with Darcy, our Marketing Coordinator, trying to better understand how our federated search technology works. It’s exciting when we work with somebody like Joan who finds our applications really useful and becomes an ambassador for my company and products.

On Monday afternoon I attended a session at CIL entitled – Innovative Applications of Federated Search Technology, the main reason for my trip to D.C. At the start of this session I had the pleasure to present a $1000 check to Ken Varnum, winner of the Federated Search Blog contest and see him give his presentation to a room full of 200-300 attendees. Ken’s winning article – Project Lefty: More Bang for the Search Query was published in its entirety in the current issue of Computers in Libraries magazine and is available on the Enterprise Search Center website. This is the second year that we have sponsored the contest. Dick Kaser and Jane Dysart at Information Today have been great helping us to promote the contest and provide a great forum for the winner to present their work.

Finally on Thursday on my way to the airport I took somewhat of a detour and went to visit Wally at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Wally Grotophorst is Associate University Librarian at GMU and it wasn’t long after we started providing our Explorit Federated Search solution to GMU that Wally and his colleagues won an award as the 2009 Campus Technology Innovators for Portals. Wally has been using our Search Builder product to create a number of custom research portals including ones for Colonial History, Bioengineering, Neuroscience and Nursing Administration. Wally is another wonderful supporter of Explorit and Deep Web Technologies and finally meeting Wally in person was a great way to end my week in D.C.