Welcome to Index Data's blog. I have been creating tools and applications for information professionals for close to 20 years at this point. As a company, Index Data works with national libraries, large consortia, and businesses who manage or integrate information for scholars and professionals. Over the years we have developed an approach to problem solving which involves wrapping the solution into reusable, flexible software modules which we make available to other developers. The vast majority of the code we have written over our history has been released under open source licenses, and our community of users is one of our greatest assets and a daily source of interesting challenges.

This won't be one person's blog. Index Data is very much a team, and we're also a pretty varied group of individuals. As of this writing, we have seven different nationalities represented, and we work together from five countries. What we do share is a great enjoyment in working with other people to solve software problems. And we aim to make this blog a vehicle for sharing some of that experience and sense of fun with other people.

Our goal is to post primarily original material rather than reposting other folks' press releases, since you most likely already get those from search engines and RSS aggregators. We hope to be sharing observations about professional events that we attend, tips and tricks related to our own software or to the field of searching and metasearching in general, and some of our own observations as developers and advocates of open standards and open access to information and software.

We invite your comments and discussion. We're hoping at this point that we won't need moderation, and we'll be delighted to see and participate in a vigorous discussion.

Most of Index Data in New York City in January, 2009