A New Frontier
Micro based library
circulation seems well I hand with floppy and hard disk systems
coming along quite nicely if you please. The next step is
the online catalog of which the problems are many and varied and
over the next several issues we’ll address downloading bibliographic
records, the type of record you will use and the hooks necessary to
combine it to a circ and acquisition. The first installment is a
consideration of the hardware you’ll need to get up and running………..
A floppy based catalog
is out of the question. You need too much storage, too many access
points, and a great deal more speed that the flexible platters can
provide. A 500 volume personal library might be OK on a floppy, but
for heavey duty work your disks are going to be hard.
How many access
points will you have to your collection? I cannot see less than
three: one to do data entry/cleanup/and two for your users to search
your data. At the present I am recommending one for every 25 seats
in your reading area; your local situation may demand more
(especially when the 8th grade class comes in for library
instruction!!) If you are going to do circ then one needs to be at
every circ point. Systems that support real cheap “dumb
terminals” (in the current $500 range) are preferable to those that
require you to buy a $1000 micro and commit it to the purpose.
“Networking” is a
generic term for tying micros together. I suppose I could call BC
and show you 30 places using the online cats at the moment, but he
world quickly separates with the particular hardware brand you are
using. There’s Apple, blue, and others.
Apple networks at
present rely on the Corvus (that’s a brand name) hard drive which
links micros using a concept they call Omninet. It uses
some electronics to allow micros to share a common hard disk, but it
tends to be very slow with more than three micros hooked up.
The problems here are
even deeper. Corvus is taking a dive (read hard times) and
many folks speculate how long they are going to be around. Some of
my software development friends are really p-o’ed with the way
Corvus has supported their development efforts (although others have
said good stuff) and you keep reading in the trade journals how
Corvus keeps laying folks off trying to get their act together.
to be
continued……………………………
Atlanta Happenings
Betty Costa informs me
that the Computer Cat users are going to get together on
Friday evening during the AASL show in Atlanta…If any other micro
user groups are going to be getting together there (or anywhere else
for that matter) we’d appreciate hearing about it here at WLN
(not the bibliographic utility) so we can get the word out. Also
the 2nd and a half annual Wired Librarian’s Spritual
Enlightenment and Social Development Hour will be held Thursday at
the Westin Peachtree in Atlanta – bring your own firmware.
Swap Shop
An old feature with new
life! Up north (with the tooks and the Tuborq) David MacSween, the
librarian at the Coast Guard College (P.O. Box 4500, Sydny N.S.
B1P61) has an acquisition system for an HP 3000 (Series 40) that he
will swap for a serials or LC Cataloguing program. I know this is
not a microcomputer application, but Dave sent an inquiry to the
clearinghouse and I know the kinds of places
WLN
(not the bibliographic utility) gets left.
