Homeland Security Digital Library Virtual Library Redesigned

By Ann Longmore-Etheridge as posted on www.securitymanagement.com

The government's Homeland Security Digital Library has been redesigned for increased flexibility and usability. The virtual library provides a collection of strategy, policy, organization, and research documents for policy makers, students, educators, and the homeland security community. The more than 30,000 records are tagged with metadata by a staff of librarians and subject-area specialists. A dynamic index of 90,000 documents from select Internet sites bolsters the collection.

Users can search the collected works by topic, event, and keyword, as well as by document-collection, field, and date parameters. A reference page on policy and strategy offers direct access to popular items, including legislation, presidential directives, academic research, and other policy and strategy documents. A meta-search engine enables searches across more than 50 article databases, including government, think tank, academic, and library sources.

In addition, the library Web site ( www.hsdl.org ) highlights events, other Web sites, and new additions to the collection. The library is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Office of Grants and Training and the Naval Postgraduate School's Center for Homeland Defense and Security.

Helping the library organize its vast resources, Teragram Corporation provided categorization software that automatically categorizes documents saved in multiple formats for easy search and retrieval. The company worked with librarians to develop the semantic, rules-based model that allows the content-development teams to manage the rapid growth of the collection. The software also reports on variations from expected category volume, allowing taxonomists to refine the terminology and rules as discourse shifts and topics change over time.

About Teragram
Teragram Corporation is the market leader in multilingual natural language processing technologies that use the meaning of text to distill relevant information from vast amounts of data. Founded in 1997 by innovators in the field of computational linguistics, Teragram alone offers the speed, accuracy and global language support that customers and partners demand to retrieve and organize growing volumes of digital information. Teragram helps customers perform more efficient searches and better organize information in more than 30 languages, enabling them to reach new markets and make better decisions. Teragram serves customers across the publishing, pharmaceutical, telecommunications and financial industries, including AOL, Ariba, Ask Jeeves, Associated Press, CNN, Factiva, FAST Search & Transfer, Forbes.com, InfoSpace, Kofax, Naval Post Graduate School, NYTimes Digital, OneSource, Reed Business Information, Ricoh, Sony, Verity, WashingtonPost.com, the World Bank, and Yahoo. For more information please contact 1-617-576-6800 or visit http://www.teragram.com/info.