Transferring Information from Research to Industry with askSam

By Arne Moller, Agri Contact

Since 1974, a small Danish company, Agri Contact ( http://www.agricontact.dk ) has focused on the transferring of information from research all over the world to a client group of Danish companies, that produce products and services for agriculture and food production.

Right from the beginning, information on the individual research or development activity transferred has been documented and filed in the form of "notes" as shown in fig 1, with a reference to the information source and with reference to further documentation if available.

Fig 1

Through regular visits to the individual clients, the new relevant "notes" are presented and discussed.

To allow internal backward searches in the system that was started in 1974, we established the EKAHA punch card system, which at that time was rather advanced.

This system was initiated in the late 80's and later converted to a PC based system.

During the last few years, several clients have requested the possibility to doing on-line searches in our database. We considered different systems to facilitate this request and selected askSam. askSam's Web Publisher was the perfect fit for our requirements and it was affordable. askSam was also the only tested system, which could handle our old notes which were written in WordPerfect.

With kind assistance from askSam associates and two small Danish computer companies M-webdesign ( http://www.m-webdesign.dk ) and Time2web ( http://www.t2w.dk ) we launched the system in 2002, which now stores about 14,000 notes allowing our clients to do full Boolean searches.

We are very pleased with askSam and with the kind and efficient back up service offered by the company.

Arne Moller

Agri Contact

Owner/President

Torupvejen 97

3390 Hundested

Denmark

email: email@agricontact.dk