Pittsburgh, PA -- May 8. Carnegie Mellon University has signed an agreement with The Library Corp. and its NlightN division, both in Reston, Va., to provide a non-exclusive license to The Lycos(TM) Catalog of the Internet, developed by Michael L. Mauldin, a research scientist at Carnegie Mellon's Center for Machine Translation in the School of Computer Science.
The Lycos Catalog will be incorporated into NlightN, a new on-line service which features a universal index to electronically stored data. Under development since 1990, the NlightN Universal Index is the world's largest single index, allowing users to retrieve data from hundreds of databases and news sources. The marriage of the Lycos Catalog with NlightN will greatly expand the Internet resources available to NlightN's customers.
Under the terms of the agreement, Carnegie Mellon will maintain and expand The Lycos Catalog and deliver regular updates to The Library Corp., ensuring that NlightN customers have access to the most up-to-date index of the Internet.
Since its inception last July, Lycos has cataloged more than 3.75 million of the estimated six million documents on the Web and has serviced more than nine million search requests. The system is used by more than 225,000 people each week.
The Lycos Catalog is a software system which includes a robot that searches the World Wide Web and catalogs the documents it finds. It also includes an information search engine that helps people with varying computer skills access information quickly and easily when they type in key words or topics.
"The Library Corporation was the first to contact us, realizing the value of Lycos," said Mauldin. "We are pleased that the Lycos Catalog is part of NlightN's database offering. We look forward to our continued relationship with The Library Corporation."
The Lycos exploration robot reads the Web, locates new or changed documents and builds abstracts which consist of title, headings and subheadings, 100 most significant words, first 20 lines of the document and its size in bytes and number of words. The catalog is continually updated by the Lycos exploration agent.
NlightN offers more than 500 databases from a wide variety of international sources. In addition to archived information, NlightN provides full-text indexing of 14 newswire services, including Knight-Ridder, PR Newswire, Sports Wire and Investment Wire, which provide live feeds 24 hours a day.
"We are delighted to be a Lycos distributor," said Brower "Murf" Murphy, chief executive officer of The Library Corp. "Dr. Mauldin has extracted from the Internet the most comprehensive compilation of Web sites available, and we look forward to receiving an ever expanding amount of data from Carnegie Mellon."
"The licensing of Lycos to The Library Corporation is another example of how the world-class research of Carnegie Mellon scientists benefits all of us," said Carnegie Mellon President Robert Mehrabian. "An important element of our university's mission is to foster relationships that enable us to transfer the knowledge we create to business and society."
The Library Corporation, incorporated in 1975, is one of the largest library automation vendors in the U.S., supplying more than 12,000 libraries. The privately held company has been a pioneer in applying new technologies such as multimedia and artificial intelligence. Its innovations include the first indexing scheme for Library of Congress bibliographic data on computer output microfiche and the world's first commercial CD-ROM application, which placed three million Library of Congress records on CDs.
NlightN is at 1807 Michael Faraday Court, Reston, VA 22090, 703-904-1010. Its Internet address is (http://www.nlightn.com).
The Lycos(TM) Catalog of the Internet is named after a predatory spider. Its address on the Web is (http://lycos.cs.cmu.edu).
