SPE Papers Adds Geographic Search and New Login procedures

Dear eLibrary Subscriber:

I am writing to let you know that later this week SPE will launch a new way of searching the eLibrary -- a map-based search. SPE has licensed MetaCarta's proprietary technology for identifying geographic locations within documents. If geography is important to a search, this new tool can be very useful. We will be promoting this new technology during our Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition next week.

We know that some of your companies are using this technology internally. We anticipate that anyone who has previously used this technology will be very comfortable with it from the beginning. For others, we have a Help/Users Guide link at upper right on the page to assist them in getting started.

The search technology is very different from the Autonomy search engine that powers our normal eLibrary search. While we know that people will be tempted to compare them, there's really no basis for doing so. We hope that customers will see them as complimentary approaches to finding the answers they need. Which is "better" will depend on how important geography is to the solution.

As you know, until SPE completes its migration to new security software at yearend, IP-validation of users against your subscription occurs when they connect to a link on our website and then get redirected to the eLibrary. For the remainder of 2006, we suggest that you tell users who want to use the new map-based search to first go to the eLibrary like they normally would, then click on the tab to go to the map-based search. This will assure that the validation happens and their usage will be properly assigned to your subscription. If they go directly to the map-based search, they will not be logged in correctly to use your subscription.

Once we complete the transition of our security software at yearend, IP-validation will be more transparent and will no longer require a link from your intranet to SPE as part of the validation process. We are looking forward to this change and the many other benefits it offers. Over the next couple of months, we will be in contact to verify that we have the correct list of IP ranges for your organization.

Two other changes we are making as part of this process will also affect your users. First, everyone using a corporate IP-validated subscription will need to have their own individual login beginning in January. All SPE members already have a login, and many others in your organization may also have registered for a meeting, submitted an abstract, bought a book, or conducted other business that required a login. For those who don't already have a login, getting one is easy. The second change is that login will now be email address. This simple change should make login easy to remember.

We're excited about the many changes that we are making to make the SPE website and the eLibrary more useful for our customers. The map-based search of the eLibrary is one change that we could implement now. We hope that your user base will find it useful.