2001 annual report now available: revenues increased by 9%, subsidiary set up in the USA
Fiz Karlsruhe increased its revenues by 9% as compared to the previous fiscal year.
Revenues amounted to €20.8m (2000: €18.97m).
Expenditure totalled €28m (2000: €27.41m).
Fiz Karlsruhe's share of proprietorial financing grew to 80.1% from 69.2% in 2000.
Taking also into account the collection services for business partners, usage of STN databases at the Fiz Karlsruhe host increased to €50.6m from €49.1m in 2000.
The number of staff has increased to 332 from 317 in 2000. "These numbers clearly show that the long strategy to offer content plus tools and hence expand Fiz Karlsruhe to become a one-stop shop for scientific and technical information, was the right decision," says Klaus Rupf, chairman of Fiz Karlsruhe's supervisory board up to February 2002, in his foreword of the 2001 Annual Report.
Content - high-quality sci-tech information - and tools - powerful software products developed for information retrieval and knowledge management - are made available to customers, in particular within the STN network.
Fiz Karlsruhe operates the STN International online service jointly with its partners in the USA and Japan.
Much like in the past fiscal year, the operation of STN International was at the core of Fiz Karlsruhe's activities.
A total of 216 databases (2000: 213) containing approximately 350m documents were available for online access; of the 216 databases, 109 databases (2000: 107) containing approx.
140m documents are loaded at Fiz Karlsruhe.
Income source of the databases loaded at Fiz Karlsruhe is fairly evenly divided among German-speaking countries, rest of the European countries (except for Eastern Europe), as well as the USA and Canada, and to a lesser extent Japan.
Databases with patent information played again a significant part in the increase in turnover.
"STN International has continued to maintain its top position as provider of online information in chemistry and patents," comments Georg Friedrich Schultheiss, managing director of Fiz Karlsruhe.
A valuable addition to Fiz Karlsruhe's portfolio of content is the Dkilit database covering the world's literature in polymer and plastics chemistry and technology.
The database was acquired from Deutsches Kunststoffinstitut (DKI). Further databases - partly in cooperation with international partners - are being set-up and continuously updated.
Along with the extension of the content offering, the tools to access and handle data have been further developed.
The web interface STN on the Web now has two new Assistants for menu-driven searching and displaying of documents.
An important enhancement of the STN Easy web interface has been STN Easy for Intranets, designed for customized searching from the corporate intranet.
Considerable improvements of the options for searching biosequences have contributed to enhance the attractiveness of our offering in this promising market.
There was a notable increase in usage of the Fiz AutoDoc automated full-text delivery system: 62,000 orders for full-text specialist publications, ie 16% above last year's figure, were received via this web service.
In 2001 Fiz Karlsruhe Inc, the US subsidiary in Princeton, NJ, was set up.
"The American market holds a large potential for technology and patent information.
As we can provide a collection of most suitable databases, we want to increase our marketing efforts to this effect," explains Professor Schultheiss. Also, Fiz Karlsruhe participates in the set-up of various internet portals, in European Union projects in the field of mathematics and, in cooperation with Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB) Hannover, in the development of the full-text server GetInfo.
With its multitude of services and activities, Fiz Karlsruhe is set to grow into a comprehensive competence center for all kinds of electronic sci-tech information.
Fiz Karlsruhe is a non-profit organization for scientific and technical information.
A worldwide scientific service institution, the company produces, provides and markets scientific and technical information services in printed and electronic form.
In its function as European Service Center (host) of STN International, The Scientific and Technical Information Network, Fiz Karlsruhe offers worldwide access to bibliographic, factual and full-text databases in all fields of science and technology, among them the world's largest and most important patent databases.
The electronic version of the 2001 Annual Report (in German language) is available as pdf file on the FIZ Karlsruhe website (link above).
