History

How It All Began

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 nonprint educational materials. It contains bibliographic records of over 423,000 audiovisual items in all subject areas, all age levels, and 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.

Where We Are Today

The recent chapter of Access Innovations' history is highlighted by the introduction in 1998 of a product software line called Data Harmony. 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 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.

The successful use of Data Harmony software in database projects at Access Innovations leads us to believe that this current chapter will be very exciting, full of new challenges and rewards.

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 are providing us with a new chance to offer our clients the knowledge gained by our more than two decades of experience.