The late Dr. Steve Pollitt was working on OPAC "view-based searching" (i.e. facets) in the early 1990s and, I believe, is cited in the Endeca patent. I'm sure there was a working test system based on the University of Huddersfield's library catalogue in the late 1990s (probably 1998).
http://www.oclc.org/research/dss/pollitt.htm
It's to our eternal shame that the library director at the time refused to co-operate in Steve's request to pilot his system in the live OPAC.
By around 2001, he was regularly demoing an test OPAC interface (that used facets) of Dewey at conferences in the UK. Sadly Steve passed away before I took up position as the Library Systems Manager, otherwise I would have pushed strongly for his pioneering work to be integrated into our live OPAC.
In a weird piece of serendipity, the same technology park in which Steve set up his company ("View Based Systems") that specialised in implementing facetted searching also houses a gallery named "North Light": http://www.northlightgallery.org.uk/
regards
Dave Pattern
Library Systems Manager
University of Huddersfield
________________________________
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries on behalf of Hahn, Harvey
Sent: Mon 19/03/2007 22:08
To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Patents on faceted navigation: what's the impact?
The Northern Light "Custom Search Folders" patent (5,924,090) was applied for on May 1, 1997 (which is why NL could claim "patent pending" when it opened to the public on August 5) and was granted on July 13, 1999. (The inventor, by the way, was Marc F. Krellenstein of Chestnut Hill, MA, with Northern Light Technology LLC of Cambridge, MA, being the assignee.)
Additionally, from the prior message below, the name is spelled "Vivisimo" and its Web search engine is now called "Clusty" (the clustering search engine) at http://clusty.com/.
All FWIW.
Harvey
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Received on Mon Mar 19 2007 - 17:35:18 EDT