Swets Adds Muse Global's Content Mining

-- Library Journal, 4/30/2007

Say Swets, and most librarians immediately think subscription agent, but in the past few years the company has expanded its horizons, most recently incorporating MuseGlobal's Content Mining tool into its federated search service, SwetsWise Searcher. According to Swets, the tool "mines returned search results for each search query, identifying common terms found in those results and weighing the terms based on frequency." This allows users to combine terms and refine their search for deeper digging.

Ezra Ernst, who took over as CEO of Swets Information Services Inc. in late 2004, told LJ that while federated searching is great for aggregating results, there's a problem with presentation since it doesn't group them in statistical order. "At Swets, it's all about user management of information, acquisition, and access," he said. "You need to do your searches, but then you need logical algorithms that present it for you in a way that you can use. We partnered with MuseGlobal to do statistics on search results, to group them into like-minded categories, so it's easy for librarians [and users] to get to the end content." When looking to revamp its searching prowess, Swets clicked with MuseGlobal, Ernst said, because the vendor "is very willing to partner and come up with new solutions. It doesn't have to be their product; it can be a new intellectual leap." Ernst said that in seeking partners, Swets goes after companies "that will become greater than the sum of our parts and match things together."