Program Meeting Notes
March 27, 2001
One-Stop Shopping: Adventures in Content Integration
Good-Time Charley's

Members were encouraged to bring a children's book for donation to the Trenton Area Soup Kitchen (TASK). Our meeting started with an introduction to TASK by Kelly Hansen, Director of Adult Education. She gave us an overview of TASK's services, which, in addition to providing 2500 meals per week, include literacy and computer training.

Marc Donatiello was the moderator for the panel of three information professionals who discussed web-based content integration projects at their respective organizations.

The first speaker was Suzanne Cole, Chief Librarian of The Pew Charitable Trusts. She discussed Pew in the News, a project that integrates external news about the Trusts with internal announcements. It is part of the Daily Bulletin that appears on the intranet. This project integrates a daily news feed from Dow Jones Interactive with a custom interface developed by the Trusts IT department. The custom interface allows Pew in the News to maintain the look and feel of the Trusts' intranet. Developing a custom interface also allowed integration of news from publications that are not available fulltext on DJI.

Suzanne presented a second project named Retriever, which integrates internal documents with library materials in a catalog and document archive. Each internal document had to be scanned into Adobe pdf format and have original cataloging. They started with documents back to 1995. This project has been very popular with the Trusts' staff and they are working to scan and code older documents for inclusion. Suzanne credits the success of both projects to teamwork with the IT department and with the archive staff.

Karin Ross, Knowledge Management Operations Integrator at AstraZeneca PLC, briefly discussed a desktop library project that integrates news feeds from various content providers into a NewsEdge interface. She then presented a knowledge management project named graveVine, which provides a collaborative environment for knowledge sharing. Users establish personal interest profiles and receive a custom daily newsletter based upon their preferences. They can read and respond to articles by adding comments or escalating the importance ranking of the article. Currently there are 125 users from market research, product management and sales. The goal is to have 400 users. GrapeVine filters articles from a limited collection of sources in the NewsEdge repository.

The final speaker was Jenny Xanthos, Senior Information Scientist at Purdue BioPharma L.P. She presented the intranet site which has been developed for the Strategic Therapeutic Area Team. This project is still in development and they intend to integrate content which includes Word & Excel files, databases, calendars, intranet sites, internet sites, software and discussion groups. Currently they run a clip on Dialog for citations and abstracts from Medline. They also have patent updates from Derwent on Dialog, with links to full citations. Areas under development are forums for posting messages and a meeting calendar with links to agendas and minutes.

After the presentations, questions from the audience were addressed to all three panelists.