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AquaBrowser, developed by an Amsterdam-based company called Medialab Solutions By, ranks as one of the alternative library interfaces that has already established a substantial market presence. AquaBrowser finds use in a majority of the public libraries in the Netherlands. Largely through the marketing efforts of the Library Corporation, the product has gained a foothold among U.S. public libraries. Of the products considered in this report, AquaBrowser has been installed in the largest number of libraries. The product provides libraries with a way to supplement or replace their existing library catalog with one that includes faceted naviga- tion, relevancy ranking, visual search, and other features in high demand today.
About Medialab Solutions
Since it's based in the Netherlands, the company that created AquaBrowser may not be a familiar name in North America. Medialab Solutions was founded in 1990 by M. M. (Thijs) Chanowski as a research facility of an IT corporation called BSO Origin Philips, now known as Atos Origin. Beginning in 2000, Medialab Solutions began the development and marketing of its AquaBrowser technology for a variety of organizations, including companies, government agencies, and nonprofits. The prod- uct was originally designed to index and provide access to electronic content for a wide variety of organizations. Medialab Solutions found the highest interest in its technology from libraries. Today, Medialab Solutions focuses entirely on developing and promoting AquaBrowser for libraries.1
Current Deployments
Medialab Solutions has been especially successful with the public libraries in the Netherlands, with about 80 percent of those libraries using AquaBrowser. The first library to implement AquaBrowser was Eindhoven Public Library in the Netherlands.2
The Library Corporation distributes AquaBrowser in the United States. It signed a contract in September 2004, which was renewed for another three years in January 2007.3 Initially, Medialab Solutions worked with additional companies to distribute AquaBrowser in the United States. Both VTLS and ISACSOFT also struck deals, ubt never developed a significant number of customers for the product. In April 2005, Medialab Solutions named the Library Corporation as its exclusive distributor for AquaBrowser in the United States and Canada. Medicab Solutions markets directly in Europe and Asia.
In the United States, the Queens Borough Public Library in New York stands as one of the most notable implementations of AquaBrowser. This library...