An Overview of SPIRES and the SPIRES Consortium

SPIRES is the Stanford Public Information REtrieval System, a sophisticated information retrieval and database management system. It has been used at Stanford and over forty other research centers and academic institutions within the SPIRES Consortium for more than 15 years. Applications that have been written in SPIRES range from library catalogs to electronic messaging systems. It is the principle database management system in use on the central computer system at Stanford for research, instruction, and administration.