Prepress Technology March 2000
Managing archived information a snap with Baseview's ArchiveIQue
Staff Report
As cavemen, journalists would have been the hunters of new information and the gatherers of stored information.
Today, thanks to new system solutions such as ArchiveIQue from Baseview Products Inc., the gathering part no longer has to involve dreadful trips to the dank storage vault or frantic searches through piles of microfiches.
It is time to close the file cabinets for good and open up electronically-stored databases with the click of a button. This is where ArchiveIQue comes in.
Marketed as a product that "combines the reliability of Baseview's IQue Editorial Database System with the familiarity of a Web browser," the new search engine for databases, according to its makers, is "the archiving solution for your newsroom."
Operating at two beta test sites since early December, ArchiveIQue's first version is currently being installed at four more sites, said Jack Rosenzweig, editorial product manager for Baseview.
Simply put, ArchiveIQue allows its users to store and retrieve information from an exhaustingly large database with the agility and simplicity of a Web browser.
"ArchiveIQue gives a newsroom a data storage mechanism for all copy, images and PDFs of page layouts via a Web browser," Rosenzweig explained. "All of the text from the stories and International Press Telecommunications Council headers of the images are available via full text. All relevant publication information is transferred to the archive transparently to the user."
The archiving system has the ability to parse text headers into files which then populate the database fields.
"This makes searching the archive very simple. From the Web browser, the user can either enter text for simple query or build a complex query combining various database fields," Rosenzweig said.
The results of the search are then returned to the user's Web browser, where the user can view the story, image or PDF. The user can then import the item back to the production system via a simple Web link or send a photo or story to a wire service. Users can also customize queries to include or exclude information gathered by a sister paper that uses the same archiving system.
"The system was designed from the beginning to be used in both single- and multi-paper settings," Rosenzweig said. "Because we use an HTML template system to present the search and results screens, each paper can customize their interface to the archive as they find most useful without affecting the other properties involved."
While ArchiveIQue opens file cabinets to affiliated papers, outside users are not yet privy to information managed by the system.
"At this point [ArchiveIQue] is designed as an internal system only. We are hard at work on the second generation that will be optimized for Web visitors," Rosenzweig said. "This first version was designed to ease us into the archiving marketplace. There is a lot more that we intend to implement in the future."
Despite the limitations of a first version system, employees at The State News in East Lansing, Mich., which served as one of the two beta test sites, likes ArchiveIQue so far.
The archiving system has shown great promise, said The State News' production manager, Dwight Biermann. "[It's] a full-fledged graphics and text database. Who could ask for more?" he said, adding that reporters and editors have grown to love it after learning how to run efficient searches.
ArchiveIQue, is reliable, low-maintenance and speedy, Biermann said. His company chose ArchiveIQue over other archiving products because of its maker's reputation and the product's reputed simplicity.
"It works without me having to putz with it all the time," he said, adding that as the lone production employee at a 30,000-circulation daily paper, he doesn't have time "to spend messing with flaky software."
To run ArchiveIQue, users must install Baseview's Transporter IQue product, which many potential ArchiveIQue customers already have as part of Baseview's IQue database engine. According to Rosenzweig, IQue is used at more than 500 locations worldwide and Baseview's Internet/Web connection product LiveIQue is used by more than 60 publications across the globe.
The IQue database engine, however, is not necessary to run ArchiveIQue, Rosenzweig said, though a steeper learning curve for the end user and the need for a librarian can result from using the product with another database system.
When it comes to hardware, a client looking to install ArchiveIQue needs a computer with enough memory to run a frames-capable Web browser. The clients can be on any platform that has a Web browser. On the server side ArchiveIQue requires a Macintosh G3 or G4 with at least 256 MB of RAM.
Baseview Products Inc.
734.662.5800
www.baseview.com