Education Nonprofit Creates Online Archives for Knowledge Transfer - Deploys Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Solution for Online Access and Knowledge Sharing

Vancouver, BC (PRWEB) July 9, 2007

Eloquent Systems, a leader in solutions for archives, museums and specialized libraries, is pleased to announce that AVID Center now provides online access to its corporate archive, which houses a rich set of educational materials as well as the organization's historical documents. The Eloquent solution is facilitating online knowledge transfer to assist in the tremendous growth of the AVID program nationwide.

With the recent retirement of AVID founder Mary Catherine Swanson, AVID Center has lost a valuable resource that has developed and guided the program from a single high school class in 1980 to more than 3,500 schools in 2007. The archives are serving to preserve the corporate memory of the organization while also allowing the transfer of Ms. Swanson's knowledge and teaching materials, as well as the materials and teaching aids developed by hundreds of other educational professionals involved in the program.

AVID Center is a nonprofit organization established in 1992 to promote the AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination) program. The AVID program successfully prepares fourth- through twelfth-grade students whose grades fall into the academic middle range for four-year college eligibility.

"AVID's archives, representing a wide range of content, are used by teachers, counselors, administrators, superintendents, journalists, and legislators. With the ever-increasing demand for the AVID program, online access is vital," said Mary Catherine Swanson. "The Eloquent solution will assist in supporting the training of 20,000 educators who are joining the AVID program."

Eloquent solutions make it easy for clients to capture and describe their data, and for their end users to search and access that information. Flexible and scalable, Eloquent products can be customized to meet the needs of any organization; solutions can be hosted by Eloquent Systems or the client. Taking advantage of Eloquent's software-as-a-service option, AVID Center opted to deploy a hosted solution.

Eloquent's core WebGENCAT engine was designed to support traditional archival and collection descriptions, as well as multimedia content that includes oral histories, scanned photographs, PDF documents and links to external content.

"Our customers appreciate the fact that the solution is quick to deploy and user friendly; they aren't required to have in-depth knowledge of archiving in order to take advantage of the system," said Merv Richter, President of Eloquent Systems. "The only thing our users need to do is enter the metadata descriptions into the appropriate fields on the Web interface. Where the files are digital, those can be easily uploaded into the system as well".

As files are uploaded and the archives described, they can be accessed globally via Eloquent's PublicSearch, and SpiderSearch modules, the latter of which allows the archives to be indexed and accessed by public search engines like Google and Yahoo.

About AVID
The AVID Center was established in 1992 as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization to promote the AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination) program, a system for fourth- through twelfth-grade students in the academic middle that successfully prepares them for four-year college eligibility.

AVID was originally developed by Mary Catherine Swanson at Clairemont High School in 1980 in response to the San Diego Unified School District's court-ordered integration of the city's schools. The AVID program has a proven track record of bringing out the best in students, and closing the achievement gap. Beginning with one high school and 32 students, the AVID system will be deployed in 4,369 schools by 2010.

AVID targets students in the academic middle - B, C and even D students - who have the desire to go to college and a willingness to work hard. These are students who are capable of completing rigorous curricula but are falling short of their potential. Typically, they will be the first in their families to attend college, and many are from low-income and minority families. AVID pulls these students out of their unchallenging courses and puts them on the college track: acceleration instead of remediation.

About Eloquent Systems Inc.
Eloquent Systems is a leader in developing solutions for archives, museums and specialized libraries. With a global customer base, Eloquent Systems has been meeting the knowledge management needs of corporate, government and heritage institutions since 1975.

All Eloquent applications are built using Eloquent's WebGENCAT engine, an extremely fast and robust Web-based tool for powering large information collections. Eloquent solutions can be hosted by a client's internal IT department or through Eloquent's own convenient hosting service. In addition to its own team, Eloquent has a network of associates and agents across North America to service customers directly.

For more information about Eloquent Systems, please visit http://www.eloquent-systems.com.

For more information, contact:
Merv Richter, President
Eloquent Systems Inc.
604-980-8358

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