Library Micro News

Fruit Flavored CD ROM

     The 14 Oct 85 issue of Info World confirms a sneaking suspicion we mentioned last month Management Resources International of Schaumberg IL is introducing a CD Rom interface for the Apple ][ family. Announced price is steep ($795) but you get a 68000 driven 512 (expandable to 1.5M) world and GEM DOS. It will originally run a Sony drive but IW reports that “other interfaces will also be developed.”

Micro Based Marc Format Data Entry

      Hank “Dublin Dictionary” Epstein from Information Transform, the wizard that brought the world the MITINET concept (a super micro based record version project) is doing it again. In Chicago he showed ma a real early version of MITINET/marc, and we met again at the Wisconsin Library Association meeting where he demoed it for that wide base of cheese-please users. I’m not supposed to talk about it until I get a version (rumored around turkey time) but since it is going to solve a major conversion hassle for small libraries I am compelled to break the news.

     It’s similiar in look and feel to a micro based catalog card production system (and hopefully he will make the commitment to write a few print drivers for folks to get paper out of the product) but he has tables built in so that the fields get marc tags. This could be the single most important development in retro  since we discovered we did not have to do it online.

Software News

Somewhat of a Librarian’s Helper

I finally put my hands on The Librarian’s Helper from Scarecrow Press at our Iowa Library Association meeting earlier this month. I only played with it for about twenty minutes, but it was enough to convince me that this $195 (Apple user’ add another $100 for their CPM card or use your own) offering is both mediocre and overpriced.

     First problem I have is that it is old CPM stuff (add another card to your fruit) and only the  MS-DOS version writes files. Type a set and run a set is no way to do catalog card production. You don’t see the card until you finish data entry and you have to go into a configuration menu to tell Librarian’s Helper  to print more than one set of cards or labels.

      I had to laugh when the vendor said Apple’s were “dead” and they weren’t concerned about the large amount of hardware, especially in school libraries, already out and about. The software isn’t good enough to do academics cataloguing and not more than an hour earlier another vendor said their “inhouse study showed 60% of public libraries and 80% or school libraries using Apples” so I guess Scarecrow intends to pick up the market on all the CPM machines and fight a losing battle because of LH;s mediocrity in the MS-DOS market.

     Librarian’s Helper just doesn’t cut it, and that’s kinda sad because Scarecrow does so much other, neat obscure stuff. Maybe they ought to stick to print. LH won’’t make them winner’s in libraries that understand the concept of “good micro, good library.”

ETT, ,Phone Home

In Milwaukee, (where a good deal of this issue is being written) I had the privilege of meeting two sharp young kids who have a good product but a poor idea of the library market. Eric Telingator and Mike Blum ran an outfit called ETT Library Automations (9201 Drake Ave., Suite 103, Evanston IL 60203) and have a neat acquisitions system titled not so strangely ETTACO. It is a full function (vendor, selection and fund accounting) acquisitions systems that looks slick.

     The young ‘uns have this puppy up on PRODos or MS-DOS hard drive systems but their experience seems to be with large public libraries.  They want $2500 for their software (Attila the Hun does software) which is way out of range. If they come out with a version that handles 1000-2000 titles on something like the new  800K UniDisk (Apples 3 ½ “ drive) they could put a thousand of them in the field in a year. They promised to keep me informed.

The Circulation Manager

     Long ago and far away (WLN: not the bibliographic utility Sept ’84) I reported on The Circulation Manager from MicroSolutions (587 W. 77^th, Indianapolis IN 46260) as an overpriced circ system. They have been burning the midnight oil, retooled the product (adding a ton of reports) and put the price where it should be - $220. It requires two drives, but you can scope it out yourself with their free demo disk. As soon as they send me the full blown program (some folks don’t do windows – I don’t do demos) we’ll tell you some more.

Cosmic Construction Set

     Sunburst sent a whole box of goodies over, and as I play with them one at a time (such a valuable commodity in today’s world) we’ll let you in. My first whack was at Planetary Construction Set, another fine problem solving piece of software from the NY folks who have built perhaps the finest line of think tank stuff for the educational world.

      You can choose to be either a cadet (somewhat easier than) or a Captain (definitely a challenge). As a former, you “construct” planets detailing mass, distance, inclination and composition (among others). After you easily tinker with the life and death stuff, the program builds and displays your product, detailing length of year, atmospheric composition and such. You can fine tune or quit at this point.

     Kirk, and the rest of the folks with scrambled eggs on their caps have a slightly more difficult task – design a planet for an alien. This is far from easy and I failed to build one according to specs in my several tries because I lack (even though PCS includes an excellent briefing on how to do it) basic science skills. Sunburst  even throws in a little teacher control so the kids are forced to build a planet for a particular type of species.

     Planetary Construction Set will go well in physics or biology classrooms from grade 8 up and like so many of the other Sunburst  titles, is the kind of stuff I think you ought to use a computer for in an educational setting. Perhaps the only drawback is the kids have to copy from the screen their progress.

A Different Literacy Tack

     Glen Singer, Literacy Librarian at the Oakhill Correctional Institution (Oregon WI 53575) has produced an interesting document detailing evaluative recommendations of software for use in institutional settings.

What’s Bowker up to now?

     I’ve always ripped School Library Journal’s handling of software reviews, and they sent me something (perhaps by mistake?) that further clouds the issue. It assumed I was a  “Computer Software Distributor” and asked for the “four most outstanding language arts programs” I released during 1985. It described that they were going to publish the “first of a series of special announcements of new computer software” in the Feb 86 issue. Now product announcements for micro using librarians is joined by product announcements for school librarian. Perhaps if the library community is lucky they’ll start doing software reviews right. Don’t hold your breath – I’m not holding mine.

Central Illinois Library Micro User’s Group Meeting

     Randy at Parlin-Ingersoll Library in Canton, IL sent word that their second meeting of this academic year will be held there on  Friday , Nov 15. There will be mini-course on Appleworks, PFS-File and a day of software demonstrations. If you want more info, drop them a note at 205 W.. Chestnut, Canton IL 61520. You’d better hurry if you’re interested.

Tooks and Turborgs

     The good folks at the Ministry of Education / Provincial Educational Media Center (7351 Elmbridge Way, Richmond BC V6X 1B8) sent a copy of their excellent Evaluations: Microwave. They have switched to Mac output (looking good, hey!) and evaluations include product info, descritpions, Strengths / Weakness, and potential use. Nine issues per year with an annual index for $50. Top notch evaluation tool.

“We hear Wordstar is hard to learn”

     Comedy by Wire ($9/year: Billiam Coronel, 431 W. 45^th St, NY NY 10036) reports that the government of India purchase an Apple ][c mail ordered from a Computerland in Barstow, CA to show the world they “are serious about technology”. They purchased the machine mostly for national budgeting and word processing. When asked why they chose PFS:Write for software the response was “We hear Wordstar is hard to learn.” Constant humor, and a real gas.

Be Youse Own Consultant (part Third)

     We’ve covered word processing and spreadsheet to this point, and now it’s time to get to the tool you’ll use most often – the data base.

     A data base is an electronic version of the steel file cabinet. A drawer is a file in computer lingo; a folder turns into a record, and each individual piece of information is a data base field. Each field (in most data base software anyway) has a length which is known as a “field length”. If you add these lengths up you know how big the record is and if you multiply the number of records by their length, you can get the file size. If you don’t know how big the file is going to be, you will face problems later on .

     I always recommend that folks start out with small files, things like an AV equipment inventory, periodicals holdings, film bookinsg or a software listing. Learn by playing around, the software will show you it’s strength: sorting.

     You use a data base to manage information that needs to be viewed in several different ways. You want to know what periodicals come due in October or what periodicals go to a particular department or a higher level queery such as the cost of the periodicals going to the Philosophy department (read branch library) or perhaps the cost of your entire periodical collection. Some of the information is used for library management – other elements are used for providing users complete holdings information. The data base gives you the power to display the same information in a variety of ways.

     In developing an application for the data base, consider first what you want out of the file. Create fields that will report that information, keeping in mind the operational capabilities such as how many and what kind of sorts will the program allow you to perform.

     Here’s a simple example of a data base mailing list:

     It’s a file of the producer contacts I use for the December Buying guide. In this particular display there are fields for the contact’s name, the company, their street adress, town, state, and zip. The display shows only the information I use for mailing labels, but also includes fields for their product names, the hardware it runs on, the cost, and some notes. Because it is flexible (Microsoft File for the Mac to be exact) I can do a lot of things with it but you can do the same programs such as Appleworks or DB Master on your ][ family hardware and scores of others.

     The trick is to get a multi-function data base. Remember the Wired Librarian’s first rule of software – the more power a program has the harder it is to learn -  so expext some difficulty in getting this one up and running. If you stick with it you’ll find a lot of use.

     By now I  hope you have played with your word processor, spreadsheet, and add the data base this month. We will move next to library utility software – which believe it or not are usually canned data bases.

The Mac Page

Only In The Wired Librarian’s Newsletter

Updates

     Odesta shipped Version 2.0 of Helix which features 90 pages of updates including speeded up queries, record numbers, two dozen new calculation titles, pictures and a whole bunch more. It is grown so large that the only way to keep it bootable is use the mini-finder only. They’ve done a great job but I would be real shaky about using this in anything but a hard disk world.

     Living Videotext shipped the 512K version of Think Tank and almost everything I had trouble with in the small version has been taken care of.

     The ability of dump a whole lotta text into the outline is neat and it now supports fonts (still all or nothing but at least a choice) and the tab key works like you expect it to.  I use the 512 Think Tank  everyday – and anyone that writes probably would as well.

New Software

Crunch

     Paladin Software sent Crunch, the power spreadsheet for the Macintosh over. Power is there but thy Mac must be fat but you get 250 columns by 9999 rows (in theory). It is big enough to get my statewide statistics (550 libraries) and that’s prime at the moment.

     The most outstanding feature is the “icon bar” across the top. There are 21 of the common features (center/left/right/commas,currency, etc) available at the click of the rodent. The two limitations are an inability to read Multiplan files (Paladin says they will ship a utility at the end of the summer) and real problems getting to cells in a massive sheet. When you have  9,999 rows a slight drag on the box takes you a long way. What they need is a scaler so that you can go to a screen or two at a time. If you  want power however, you want Crunch. Definitely a seal of approval.

Mac Tracks

     Assimilation has made quite a hit with small Mac Utility programs and Mac Tracks provides macros reqardless of application. They are easy to install and use, the only problem is that you must create them for every application. At $29.95, every Mac user ought to have it.

An Index to the Online Issues

1983 - When there were four microcomputers at the ALA show

December 1984

1985 - wow we've got hard drives !!!