Customer: scitopia.org

Uniting 15 highly visible sci-tech societies in a groundbreaking leap from separate publisher searches to a single, vertical search portal is the unique and powerful site of scitopia.org.

The Problem: Dwindling user subscriptions to society sites

“We are really after the corporate market.  So much of that market has given up subscriptions to our journals.  We are trying to make it easy for them to find large swaths of information in a single search” said Tim Ingoldsby, Director of Strategic Initiatives and Business Development at AIP. 

Motivated to find a better way for users to access and research their information, society publishers began exploring Federated Search vendors in early 2006. The sheer volume of information searched by the electronic libraries included:

	Over 3 million articles and conference proceedings
	50 million patents from major patent offices
	full text documents from the Department of Energy Info Bridge site

Fusing the information from 15 different publishers into one comprehensive search site would prove to be no easy task. As a baseline, federated search vendors needed to have the capability to seamlessly render the societies’ diverse individual searches into a single, flawless presentation.  Clean, highly relevant results required a sophisticated integration process vital for eliminating the noise present in other search engines.

The Solution: Entice users with an elegant, easy-to-use, single-search site

Recognizing that good enough isn’t good enough, scitopia.org chose Deep Web Technologies as their federated search provider in 2006.  Barbara Lange, director of product line management and publishing business development at IEEE mentioned,“We want to help drive traffic to the societies and to promote the value of societies’ content brings with a one-stop, one-click site. Deep Web Technologies brings decades of experience to the table, and they’re very good at what they do.”

With a uniquely flexible approach, Deep Web Technologies began the process of integrating the elegant user interface created by New York design firm, Digital Pulp, with the ideals of the societies.  For accurate results retrieval, Deep Web Technologies took full advantage of each individual search field on the various sites.  Development work, such as on the author field, required technical input to merge the many diverse search formats into a single solution.  Exceptional communication was important to create a search that retained the integrity of the participating societies while giving users the agility expected from prestigious scientific and technical organizations.

At the Denver Special Libraries Association Annual Conference in June 2007, the societies launched scitopia.org.   “We publish articles now every minute of the day and night, and the moment after we publish, our [scitopia.org] search will find them.” added Barbara Lange.