St. Louis, Missouri, USA -- July 20, 1995: Data Research Associates, Inc. (NASDAQ: DRAI) announced today that it had joined the Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX), a trade association of Public Data Internetwork service providers promoting and encouraging development of the public data communications internetworking services industry in both national and international markets. In conjuction with joining CIX, the company said that it will soon expand its Internet-provision capabilities through broad-bandwith connections to the CIX router and other network access points.
In addition, the company announced that it is releasing the beta version of its World Wide Web server, DRA Web, and that it has joined the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an industry consortium run by the Laboratory for Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
President and CEO Michael J. Mellinger noted that the company intends to connect its Open DRA Net network to the CIX router in Santa Clara, California using a T3 telecommunications circuit. "This high-speed, expanded bandwith connection to the Internet is one of several elements in our strategy to continue to increase our offerings of Internet- and World Wide Web-related products and services," said Mellinger.
Mellinger added that the company's DRA Web product was being released to beta test sites this week. DRA Web allows public, academic, school and corporate libraries to provide access to their catalogs and other resources via the World Wide Web and provides the libraries themselves with Web access to the many index, abstract, cataloging and research databases available on Open DRA Net.
"With the beta release of this new product and the growing demand for extension of library automation applications into the context of the World Wide Web, membership in the W3 Consortium allows us to actively participate in the evolution of the Web as an information retrieval mechanism," said Mellinger.
The DRA Web product is publicly accessible on the World Wide Web at DRA's long-established web address: http://www.dra.com.
Data Research Associates, 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.
