SilverPlatter Information, Inc. was one of the first companies to produce commercial reference databases on CD-ROMs.

It was founded in 1983 in the United Kingdom by Béla Hatvany and Walt Winshall with the explicit intention of using CD technology to publish data, and thus provide an alternative to searching databases in magnetic tape format.

Competing with CD Plus (now Ovid Technologies), Aries, Cambridge Scientific Abstracts and Dialog, the company offered libraries a wide range of CD-ROMs.

Over the next few years the company expanded from its academic base into medical, business and health and safety CD publishing.

In 1991, it introduced searching the data held at the company's site by ERL (the electronic reference library), a system for providing hard disk access to its databases via the DXP protocol.