About Us
Founded in 1978, privately owned Access Innovations, Inc. offers an extensive line of information management and database construction products and services for academic institutions, government agencies, and industry. The company's suite of Data Harmony products provides thesaurus construction and database management tools to publishers, both primary and secondary, and to database producers, online and Web-based directory publishers, corporate libraries, web portals, and to corporations and associations with large intranets.
Access Innovations also offers specialized knowledge domains for licensing. Our taxonomy library covers a wide range of fields and disciplines, and customized domains are also available.
Company History
Access Innovations, Inc. was incorporated in October, 1978 as an information services company, offering online searches and an alternative energy database. The company was originally incorporated by Marjorie M.K.
Hlava, President and Chairman, and five other partners. Jay Ven Eman, Chief Executive Officer, joined the company in December, 1978. In January, 1980, Marjorie and Jay purchased the shares of the other partners and continued building the company.
Access rapidly branched out into the design and creation of other online databases, primarily those with bibliographic text records. The services of the company have continued to expand and now include a complete line of information management support services.
In 1984, Access purchased the National Information Center for Educational Media (NICEM) from the University of Southern California. NICEM is an international database of information about non-print educational materials. It contains bibliographic records of over 423,000 audiovisual items in all subject areas, for all age levels, and in all media types. The database is available in a variety of forms from several vendors. There is now a searchable, online NICEM database, available through the NICEM website.
In the Spring of 1995, NICEM published the International Directory for Educational Audiovisuals (IDEA), a joint production with HEADFast Software Ltd. For IDEA, NICEM also added European materials to the database.
The recent chapter of Access Innovations' history is highlighted by the introduction in 1998 of the Data Harmony software line. This suite of software products was created to market software conceived in the course of database projects. Composed of several modules, Data Harmony is designed to simplify the management of databases or text collections, with support for editorial processes. Data Harmony benefits from the recent XML standard, and utilizes screen interfaces written in Java as a means to run on existing hardware and software.
Access Innovations has also launched NewsIndexer, a revolutionary indexing system that was created specifically for the newspaper industry and uses a specialized vocabulary of terms reflecting the daily news.
Both Data Harmony and NewsIndexer have provided us with new opportunities to offer our clients the knowledge gained by our three decades of experience.
The Access Russia division was an initiative undertaken in 1992. Through the Moscow office, three databases were constructed and published on CD-ROM in 1993. Today, these include a Legislative and Regulations database, with full text in Russian, and a Scientific and Technical database. Both databases have English abstracts and are searchable in both the Cyrillic and Latin character sets. The Business and Economics database is no longer being produced, however, the Russia division has an active document and database acquisition service. In addition, the Access Russia staff is engaged in machine translation and multilingual search interface development.
Today, Access Innovations has its headquarters in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Branch and auxiliary offices are located in San Diego, California, Washington, District of Columbia, Chicago, Illinois, Maastricht, the Netherlands, and Moscow, Russia. Subcontractors throughout the world are employed on an ad hoc basis.
Already a full-service database company, Access has expanded its capabilities over time to encompass all aspects of electronic publishing into print, CD-ROM, and database publishing. The acquisition of NICEM and the establishment of Access Russia have made Access Innovations a global leader in the information industry.
Corporate Philosophy
People are our most important resource.
The employees of Access and the intelligence they contribute in the workplace are the driving force behind the continued success of Access Innovations, Inc. The philosophy of Access is that every individual, given a choice, will strive for excellence. This for the basis for the professionalism of the Access Innovations staff.
This professionalism manifests itself in hard work, seriousness of purpose shared with a sense of humor, willingness to accept responsibility, an attitude of perfectionism toward all tasks, and a spirit of cooperation among everyone that combine to form a pragmatic approach to getting the job done. This philosophy is what has placed Access at the forefront of the information industry.
