The Canadian Heritage Information Network gets wired and Information Dimensions Inc. keeps a loyal customer.
As the Internet becomes a standard business tool for corporations, software companies are scrambling to come out with Internet-enabled products to keep their customers from grazing in other, seemingly greener pastures. We've all watched as Bill Gates brought Microsoft to a screeching halt and pulled a red-faced 180 to try and catch up with Netscape and Java. Microsoft isn't the only company that's feeling the pinch, however. Throughout the industry, everyone is working overtime to come out with products that let their existing customers migrate to the Internet (and, in the process, keep the software companies in business). One such software company is Information Dimensions Inc. (IDI), which recently enhanced its offerings to include a Web server. In the process, IDI kept the business of longtime customer the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN). CHIN is a program of the federal Department of Canadian Heritage. CHIN maintains the national inventory of Canadian museum holdings, including several national databases related to archaeology, natural sciences, fine arts, and history. For years, CHIN has used IDI's Basis document management software to provide museums and heritage organizations in Canada and around the world access to Canadian and international heritage information.
CHIN has been in existence under different names since 1972, and its information has always been available by subscription only outside of Canada. Subscribers had to access a proprietary mainframe system on which the databases run and they had to be trained in how to use the not-so-user-friendly system. Feeling the pinch of national budget cuts over the past few years, CHIN needed to find a way to make its information more available to the general public and, in the process, increase its customer base. In January 1995, CHIN decided to shift its services from a packet-switching network carrier to the Internet.
CHIN's databases were all created with IDI's Basis document management software, so CHIN's first priority was to find a solution that was compatible with Basis and would be easy to deploy. This was especially important because the participating museums would continue to enter their information into the original Basis system. Fortunately, IDI had recently upgraded its Basis product line with the BasisPlus extended relational database and the Basis WebServer. Because of this, CHIN chose to remain with IDI, shift its databases over to BasisPlus, and use the Basis WebServer to enable service over the Internet. The project was headed by Gail Eagen, director of systems and access, and Karen Neimanis, chief of development. It was begun in January 1995 and was completed on October 1 of the same year.
The task of shifting CHIN's databases from Basis to BasisPlus and the Internet was daunting, especially considering the group's time limitations. In 10 months, the development team had to shift from a proprietary mainframe environment to a Unix environment, become familiar with the BasisPlus and Basis WebServer technologies, transfer CHIN's 20 databases (with over four million records) to BasisPlus, install the Basis WebServer, and get the Internet service up and running. To the team's credit, the project was completed not one day over deadline. All of the basic elements of the Web site are now up and running -- check it out at http://www.chin.gc.ca.
The initial months were spent investigating, purchasing, and becoming familiar with the new Unix systems. They chose the Sun SPARC Server 20, Model 61, running Sun Solaris 2.4 with BasisPlus LIG2. The network runs TCP/IP on a 10 BaseT network. Installing the Basis WebServer, which included introductory screens and search forms, took only two months. Figure 1 shows the first screen a visitor sees when arriving at CHIN's Web site. Your first choice is whether to see the site in English or French.
Once the screens were set, the development team had the more arduous task of transferring CHIN's 20 databases (the largest of which contained 2.5 million records) to BasisPlus. The conversion was fairly automated and took only four months to complete. Neimanis credits the rapid conversion to a group effort. She adds, "After a while it became more of a data volume issue than anything else -- you define the database, but after that it becomes an issue of just having enough computer time to do it." Although IDI provided CHIN with several migration tools to ease the process, the team still had to do a minor redesign of the databases to make everything function correctly. Eagen explains, "We ultimately had to go into each [database] individually and review it and tweak things here and there to make it work." The team also had to make sure that the new environment on the Internet could be fed from the older, original Basis environment, which the participating museums were still using.
The content of the databases came from direct data entry into Basis, not from word-processor files, which helped speed up the transition and avoided incompatibility issues. All of the participating museums have access to the original Basis system on the CHIN mainframe, and they enter their museum's information directly into their own Basis database. CHIN then takes all the separate databases (of which there are approximately 120) and creates its own superset, which is what the Internet user sees. With its earlier service, CHIN provided subscribers with documentation and training. Part of the goal with the Internet product was to create something intuitive and user-friendly enough that people could use the system without extensive training. This, in turn, would free CHIN staff for other projects.
Because the data entry is online and from diverse, bilingual sources, CHIN focuses much of its energy on establishing and promoting standards and guidelines for documenting heritage information. To assist in providing a bilingual user environment, CHIN uses IDI's thesaurus module. This ensures that searches bring up results in both languages -- not just in the language of the search criteria. For example, a search in the Humanities National Database gives a screen listing of the documents that contained the word "teapot" in English and French. (See Figure 2.) CHIN is still working on perfecting its bilingual search capabilities and is testing a multilingual thesaurus, which CHIN hopes to add to the site soon.
The new technology in BasisPlus and the Basis WebServer enabled CHIN to expand its offerings both for the public and the private sectors. A significant change was the addition of images to the databases. When performing a search for an item in the national museum inventory, for example, you now see not only information on the item but also an image of it. Going back to the teapot search results from Figure 2, when you click on the first item in the list you get the screen shown in Figure 3 (page 28). This screen contains basic, factual information about the teapot and its provenance, as well as a small picture on the bottom portion of the screen.
Another enhancement to CHIN's offerings is its Guide to Canadian Museums. Intended to serve as a resource to both industry specialists and the general public, the guide offers an extensive source of information about approximately 2000 museums in Canada. In prototype form right now (check it out on CHIN's Web site), the guide will ultimately include information on where the museums are located, what types of collections they have, their hours of operation, what events they have, what special exhibits are taking place, and so on. The site currently opens with colorful images of the flags of Canada's ten provinces and two territories. Click on one of the flags to get a list of all the museums in that region. You can also select a region by clicking on an imagemap of Canada that CHIN offers as an alternative. When you click on the museum name you get a screen showing basic information about the museum. If the museum has its own Web site, a hyperlink lets you visit that site.
Ultimately, CHIN would like to offer a more distributed environment in which its related databases are linked. In this scenario, a user could click on one of the fields of a screen, an artist's name, for example, and get a complete list of the artist's works, a brief biography, a photograph, and so on. Neimanis explains, "[It is] sort of a branching out and finding out more about the artist or the manufacturer, which could lead to a biography of the artist or other works by the artist, or to information on works from that period -- it can really start to mushroom." Now that the system's foundation is set, CHIN will devote more time to gathering the diverse data sources together to create this distributed environment. CHIN is also beta testing the Basis WebServer 2.0, which will support a more distributed environment.
A limitation that CHIN encountered in the Basis WebServer 1.0 was that it wasn't flexible in the way it let users perform searches. So far, the beta version of the Basis WebServer 2.0 shows more flexibility in this area. Toward this goal, CHIN is also taking advantage of what Eagen calls "point-of-view" research that CHIN is involved with, the Getty Art History Information Program and the Consortium for the Interchange of Museum Information. Eagen defines point of view "in the sense of thinking about how the public would search for information versus how the scholar would search for information versus how a schoolchild would search for information." Eagen continues, "We use the Basis WebServer as our interface to the Internet, and right now we have screens in which people enter their search criteria to search the databases. We want to improve those substantially to make them more understandable from different types of users' points of view." Eagen would like to see the search screens better reflect the points of view and the thought processes of more than one type of user.
Another development the CHIN staff would like to see as it expands its offerings for the general public is more educational information in its databases --not just the name of the head curator and the number of items in the museum's fish and invertebrate collection, for example. To achieve this, CHIN is working on increasing the amount of contextual information such as why the piece of art is historically important or ultimately why it matters (in other words, why your tax dollars went towards buying this and why it is different from what your three-year-old does with finger paints). Although the current databases don't support sound, CHIN is investigating technologies that will enable the addition of sound for those museums with extensive oral history collections.
Both Eagen and Neimanis agree that the initial phase of the project -- just getting the system up and running -- has been a success. The site has been operating since October 1, 1995. As of mid-February 1996, the site has averaged 5200 hits per day, with a total of 17,200 unique hits. Because the participating museums vary in size and in the resources they have available to document artifacts, the amount of data per object varies. Generally, there are approximately 40-45 fields of information per object, or approximately 3000 to 5000 bytes. Eagen states that it is difficult to know how much effort went into the project because the staff was working on several other projects at the same time, but she estimates approximately six staff years. The entire project cost $250,000 Canadian, or approximately $185,100 U.S. CHIN hopes to release an updated version of its site sometime in the spring of 1996, although no official release date has been established.
Eagen says that "the biggest challenges from my point of view were that we were moving to a Unix environment, which was new to us; we were moving to BasisPlus, which was new to us because it's substantially different from its predecessor; we were learning how to work with the Basis WebServer, which was a new product itself and was new to us." She adds, "We had to resolve issues around putting information on the Internet versus providing it to what was previously a closed client group."
In response to the question, "What would you do if you had to do it over again," both Eagen and Neimanis agree that they would hope to have more time than the 10 months they were given. The learning curve was steep: They were moving to new technologies in both hardware and software, and they were also moving to the Internet, which is a different culture and way of thinking. Eagen says, "Doing all of that at once was nothing short of interesting." After a pause, she added, "Given what we started with and where we had to be, I think we did all right ... even well!"
Information Dimensions Inc., 5080 Tuttle Crossing Blvd., Dublin, OH 43017-3569; 800-328-2648 or fax 614-761-7290; http://www.idi.oclc.org.