Swets Adds Content Mining

Subscription agent moving into new territories

By Michael Rogers -- Library Journal, 5/15/2007

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.”

A major reason for Swets's reinvention is that, in the U.S. market, 60 percent of its business “has an electronic component to it now,” Ernst revealed, “so it's no longer just print. That's why we've had to reposition and come up with new technologies. It's not enough to stick an address on a label; you really need to manage that content.”

Ernst said a key Swets product is ScholarlyStats, a usage statistics portal developed by MPS Technologies. “A big strategy for our company,” he said, “is to help our publishers and help our librarians increase usage.” ScholarlyStats takes all of the data that comes from the 60,000 publishers Swets represents and brings them together in customized reports so that librarians can look at who used particular content and for how long, to discern whether it was worth the return on investment for the content purchase. “We find content to be the long tail. We manage many different publishers, so librarians have access to anything internationally, but they need to know that it's good and it's being used,” said Ernst. “That's all tied together in our SwetsWise system that allows you to manage from an intellectual property dashboard.”

Swets has purposely positioned itself as a subscription agent only. “We're not a content publisher; we have a neutral role,” said Ernst. “As such, we feel we can get into a library and give them all of the wrappers they need around content in a way that makes sure the publishers drive usage and makes sure librarians and their users consume—we almost view ourselves as the grease in the machinery to get this going.”

In North America, the company's principle customers are academic libraries, the government sector, the medical sector such as hospitals and teaching hospitals, and, said Ernst, “anything that acts like an academic research library...we service people who have serious information consumption needs, we're not working on public libraries [except large publics]. We deal with what a major research library needs and then build systems around that for them. That's our target market.”