Isaac Network

In the late 1990s, locating information on the World Wide Web was decidedly difficult. The problem spawned a number of small, standalone collections of metadata describing high-quality Internet resources. The Isaac Network provided access to these geographically distributed metadata collections through a single searchable collection. It used standard Internet protocols to make the metadata records available, process user queries, and transfer index information between servers. The goal of the network was to bring together high-quality collections of human-cataloged Internet resources to provide a resource discovery system that allowed searchers to query the information by field, such as title, subject, author, or description. It used the Dublin Core as its standard metadata description format.