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, 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 (taxonomies) 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. 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 as well as by subscription at 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 chapters of Access Innovations' history are 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 XML standard, and uses screen interfaces written in Java as a means to be platform independent.

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 new opportunities to offer clients the knowledge gained by three decades of experience.

Corporate Philosophy

People are our most important resource.

The employees of Access Innovations and the intelligence they contribute in the workplace are the driving force behind the continued success of Access Innovations, Inc. The philosophy of Access Innovations is that every individual, given a choice, will strive for excellence. This forms 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 Innovations at the forefront of the information industry.

Team
Meet our team...