Indian Weekender article June 25 2009
New South Pacific news and info database launched
Thursday, June 25, 2009 Indian Weekender News Desk
Knowledge Basket, one of New Zealand's leading subscriber-based news and information database and archival services has announced the launch of its South Pacific database this week and invited its growing clientele to trial the service.
"We are very pleased to announce the launch of The Knowledge Basket South Pacific," director Dave Keet told Indian Weekender. Knowledge Basket has been operating since 1994 and is a partnership between consumers and suppliers of information.
It provides database services to universities, polytechnics, schools, large corporations, the New Zealand Parliament, several government departments and media researchers.
The Knowledge Basket's main databases provide a huge volume of information relating to legislation and legal matters as well as aggregated searches to Fairfax New Zealand newspapers, APN's New Zealand Herald newspapers, The National Business Review (NBR), The Independent, Radio New Zealand news, Rural News and many New Zealand magazines covering business and industry news. Indian Weekender has now joined the database as a content provider.
The Knowledge Basket is a useful service for serious researchers who understand the processes and scope of full text database searching. Databases are carefully structured and maintained; updated daily, sometimes several times a day, and there are rules and tools for effective searching.
Publishers supply The Knowledge Basket with data in all sorts of formats and at varying frequencies. The company concerts the data using automatic conversion programs that result in a uniform style of presentation so that clients can conduct searches across a wide range of sources and be sure of retrieving relevant and timely material.
Much of the material is unique to The Knowledge Basket and extends back further and more comprehensively than any other archive resource. The Fairfax newspapers go back to 1995; NZ Herald from September 1998; and RadioNZ 1999 onward. New Zealand Index has science material indexed as far back as 1840, and indexed records of newspapers and journals going back 25 years.
Its' E-clips service provides the client with timely alerts to important news. A profile of the user's interests is run in real-time against any database, and the user is electronically mailed any items that match that profile. The E-clips remains active unless requested to be stopped. A unique Legal E-clip has been particularly effective in notifying users of any new legislation passed, drafted or discussed by Parliament.
Knowledge Basket South Pacific will have similar databases from the entire Pacific region including New Zealand, Australia, Fiji and the Pacific islands region. Lindy Winterburn, Dave Keet, and Dev Nadkarni are directors in this venture. Dave and Lindy are former librarians with a great deal of experience in library and information management as well as information technology.
Besides being the editor of Indian Weekender, Dev is publisher of Pacific Business Online, writer and sub editor at the National Business Review (NBR) - New Zealand's leading business weekly, a regular contributor to the New Zealand Herald, contributing editor with the Fiji-based Islands Business International publishing group and Pacific affairs columnist for media outlets in Australia and Europe. He is also a regular commentator on South Asian and Pacific affairs on TVNZ and other international TV channels.
For more on The Knowledge Basket South Pacific, visit http://www.knowledge-basket.com.fj/about/
About Us
The Knowledge Basket New Zealand Limited is a privately owned company. The directors are Dave Keet, Linda Winterburn.
Dave and Linda, former librarians are the founders of The Knowledge Basket - Te kete o te waananga which has provided extensive archival content for New Zealand since 1994.
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