March 24, 2008:  For Immediate Release

Dr. Vinod Chachra to Present at NISO Forum

Blacksburg, VA - Dr. Vinod Chachra, CEO of VTLS Inc. will give a presentation entitled, "Improving Discovery Systems Through Post Processing of Harvested Data" at The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) forum. The two-day forum, "Next Generation Discovery: New Tools, Aging Standards," will be held March 27-28, 2008 in Chapel Hill, NC. Dr. Chachra's presentation will discuss the harvesting process for a discovery system that covers several geographically distributed repositories. It is assumed that the repositories contain not just OPAC-based metadata, but metadata related to a variety of digital objects. Issues related to consistency, aggregation, cross-walking, faceting, knowledge bases and drilldown capabilities will be discussed.

Discovering scholarly information and data is essential for research and use of the content that the information community is producing and making available. The development of knowledge bases, web systems, repositories, and other sources for this information brings the need for effective discovery tools to the forefront. The forum will include both a look at the current state of discovery tools and at new visions of what these tools might look like in the next several years.

VTLS users and anyone interested in this topic should contact VTLS Customer Services to get more information on the presentation. A copy of the Power Point presentation will be posted on the VTLS web site after the meeting.

About VTLS Inc.

VTLS Inc. www.vtls.com, a leading library automation company in business for over 30 years, provides visionary technology in library solutions to a diverse customer base of more than 900 libraries in over 32 countries. Virtua is our premier ILS solution, Visualizer is our facet-based data discovery tool, Fastrac is our RFID technology, and we also provide cutting edge software and services for Digital Libraries with Digital Imaging and VITAL, our Repository Services solution. VTLS is one of the few ISO 9001:2000 quality certified companies within the library industry.