St. Louis, Missouri, USA -- October 23, 1996: Data Research Associates, Inc. (DRA) today announced that it had signed a contract to automate libraries in the Madison (WI) Metropolitan School District.
The Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) includes 46 schools in a 72-square-mile area including the city of Madison, and all or parts of several surrounding municipalities. There are approximately 25,000 students enrolled, making MMSD the second-largest school district in the state.
Since 1968, MMSD has operated its libraries under a locally developed Automated Library Processing Program, running on an IBM AS400. All MMSD schools currently use the Follett stand-alone Unison program. DRA will convert MMSD to its DRA Schools platform in a three-phase project. The first phase will consist of the construction of a union catalog and implementation of a system licensed for 10 simultaneous users. The second phase, to be implemented within 18 months, will increase the number of users to 120. Finally, the third phase will bring the entire MMSD up on a 300-user system.
"The Madison Metropolitan School District is very excited to be building a union catalog that will truly reflect the holdings of each school in the District," said Carolyn Cain, Acting Director of Library Technology and Communication, MMSD. "We were impressed by DRA's full keyword indexing, which will allow us to easily search the unique bibliographic descriptions added by each school. DRA Web will bring us true resource sharing, enabling us to showcase local resources, district resources and information available via the Internet, making an even broader range of information readily available to our students and faculty."
The DRA Schools platform is now installed in over 1,300 school buildings in more than 50 school districts in the U.S. and Canada.
DRA, headquartered in St. Louis, is a leading systems integrator for libraries and other information providers, offering its own proprietary information services software; third-party software and hardware; Internet, World Wide Web and other networking services; and other related support services. DRA is the sole library automation vendor currently a member of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an industry consortium to develop Web standards and specifications. DRA's World Wide Web page is located at http://www.dra.com.
