Fred Pandolfi is our CTO here at Infotrieve. He is the fearless leader of our band of software gurus. Fred has a real gift for explaining incredibly complex software in plain English so we asked him about his approach to designing the Mobile Library™ software platform.
“From a design perspective, one of the benefits we had was that we had no preconceived notion of how things had been done historically. I think there’s great benefit in having a group of very smart software engineers with experience in many different industries take a look at the domain and the problem, and ultimately design a solution.
In any vertical industry the players get very used to how things have been done in the past. Look a generation or two backat the historical document delivery industry – where people ordered documents and those documents were simply delivered, without much thought as to how to integrate this content into an end-user’s workflow or other enterprise information assets. Based on our extensive discussions with Infotrieve clients, one of the concepts that emerged was the need for end-users to have access to a virtual collection of all the information assets needed to do their jobs, regardless of whether that content was licensed by the enterprise, available in a proprietary corporate database, or obtained from a traditional document delivery service. So that’s the direction we took when we began to develop Mobile Library in 2006. Today, we’re not just a STM document delivery service company We are really about providing a single point of access to whatever content an end-user needs, regardless of where the content is located or sourced from.
As a result, searching for content needed to evolve, too. Previously end-users had to use a variety of separate tools to find the content they wanted depending upon where the content was sourced from or located. With Mobile Library we extended that search concept in that we integrated our customer’s licensed and corporate content with the substantial content that Infotrieve has access to. Now researchers have a more unified view of all the content that is available with one tool.
The end-user needs the article or content to do their work. They don’t necessarily care where the content comes from, and they aren’t experts in copyright compliance. So the essence of an effective content management system is balancing the speed of delivery of the materials, the quality of the materials and the price. The enormous complexity of managing all of that data and all of the copyright issues for every corporate subscription is hidden from the end-user.”
We’re almost afraid to ask, but next time we might ask Fred to explain how that “enormous complexity” works! For more information on Mobile Library, click here.
