This product, sold as a monthly subscription and intended for use in public and school libraries, contains a year's worth of transcripts of news shows broadcast on CNN, PBS, NPR and ABC News.

Since the initial release, development work continued with a Windows version released in November 1995 along with an upgrade to the original DOS program. The Windows version closely mirrors the original interface, but adds the ability to open several transcripts at once, and makes use of standard Windows features such as the clipboard for copying sections of text to a notepad.

Interface Details

The Current Issues magazine, created in Hyperties®, Cognetics hypermedia authoring software, is also connected directly to the search program. For each issue, interesting headlines are listed so that students researching a topic can read key transcripts to help them get started with their research. Links between the hypertext articles and the search engine make it possible to go back and forth between the two parts of the program.

The anticipated user population spanned a wide range of expertise, ranging from high school students to professional researchers. In this case, we created four different access paths to the information database: two separate simple searches, a more complex fielded boolean search, and a fully hyperlinked browsing approach. The goal was to allow any user to find information in the way that was most comfortable.

The transcripts are stored in a database and accessed using the Dataware search engine. One of the most difficult challenges of this project was to create a highly usable interface for this powerful search program. Cognetics' graphical front end won praise at the Dataware user's group, as it showed that an attractive look does not have to mean a simplistic search capability.