Sirsi Selects Convera Technology to Enhance Hyperion Digital Media Archive for Libraries Worldwide

Business Wire,  June 23, 2003  

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Business Editors

TORONTO & VIENNA, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 23, 2003

Multilingual Search Capabilities Open New Opportunities for Sirsi Libraries in China and Europe

Convera (Nasdaq:CNVR) and Sirsi, the leader in new-name sales for libraries around the world(1), today announced at the annual meeting of the American Libraries Association meeting in Toronto, Canada, that Sirsi is enhancing the search and retrieval capabilities of its Hyperion(TM) Digital Media Archive offering by integrating the product with Convera's RetrievalWare(R) technology. As a result, Hyperion becomes the first digital media archive product in the library market to offer users the ability to perform full text searches in multiple languages across multiple data types.

Sirsi's Hyperion Digital Media Archive system provides librarians with an easy way to store, organize, and access their library's or archive's non-book holdings. With Hyperion, users can easily access and view full digital images of a library's collection (documents, maps, photographs, multimedia clips, etc.) from anywhere via the Internet.

By embedding Convera's RetrievalWare, the Hyperion Digital Archive is strengthened in the following areas:

-- Enhanced search functionality - RetrievalWare achieves high

levels of both recall and precision through advanced search

methods, including concept, pattern, and Boolean-based

searches that can be used independently or interactively to

enable the highest levels of accuracy. RetrievalWare's

powerful index and query pipelines use sophisticated

formatting and linguistic processing components to achieve

these results.

-- Multilingual and cross-lingual searching - RetrievalWare will

enable Hyperion users to search in numerous languages,

including Chinese, French, Spanish, and English. RetrievalWare

is currently available in more than 45 languages.

RetrievalWare's cross-lingual capability, available in six

languages, enables users to enter a search request in one

language and receive relevant result documents across multiple

languages.

-- Scalability - The RetrievalWare architecture enables it to

support thousands of users, extremely large document

repositories, and provides precise search results in fractions

of a second.

"By adding powerful multilingual search capabilities to Hyperion, Sirsi is able to strengthen its offering overseas, especially as we offer Hyperion to markets in China and Europe," said Sirsi's Berit Nelson, vice president of product management. "Sirsi also chose to embed RetrievalWare due to its scalability, multiplatform support, and the ease in which it can be deployed."

Sirsi serves more than 10,000 individual libraries of all types and sizes around the world, including academic, consortia, corporate, government, public, school, and special libraries. Among the libraries currently using Sirsi's Hyperion Digital Media Archive to organize, store, and manage their digital holdings are University of Southern Mississippi, the University of Glouchestershire, UK, the New South Wales Parliamentary Library in Australia, the Council of Europe in Straousburg, France, the Schaumburg (Illinois) Township District Library, the Engineering Research and Development Center Research Library in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and the National Association of Homebuilders in Washington, DC.

About Sirsi

Sirsi (www.sirsi.com) recognizes that today's librarians are on a mission to break down walls - barriers that limit the knowledge and resources accessible to library users. A partner with leading libraries around the globe since 1979, Sirsi provides software and services that assist libraries in breaking down walls, thereby promoting learning, empowerment, and opportunity for diverse user communities. Sirsi's portfolio of products and services includes the iBistro and iLink e-Library solutions, the Unicorn Library Management System, the Hyperion Digital Media Archive, Sirsi Rooms (TM) Context Management Solutions, and a full slate of services.

(1) Information Systems Reports, January 2003, named Sirsi the leader in new-name sales of integrated library systems for 2002. Sirsi has held this distinction each year since 1999. Library Journal, April 1, 2003, also made this distinction.

About Convera

Convera is a leading provider of mission-critical enterprise search and categorization solutions. Convera's RetrievalWare solutions maximize return on investment in vast stores of unstructured information by providing highly scalable, fast, accurate, and secure search across more than 200 forms of text, video, image, and audio information, in more than 45 languages. More than 800 customers in 33 countries rely on Convera's search solutions to power a broad range of mission-critical applications including enterprise portals, knowledge management, intelligence gathering, profiling, corporate policy compliance, regulatory compliance, customer service and more. For more information, contact Convera at 800/788-7758, via e-mail at info@convera.com or on the Web at www.convera.com.