MetaMicro, a turnkey vendor of automated library systems founded in 1980, has announced a turnkey serials control system. It is a microcomputer-based system that provides the procedures that are needed to control serials in all but the largest libraries.
The system supports check-in, routing, automatic claiming, binding, financial control, and duplicates control. It can accommodate full-MARC records; full-MARC authority records can also be loaded. No other information was available in mid-January.
The system uses the Lear Siegler ADM-42 terminal, that firm's top-of-the-line terminal. Up to five terminals may be used on a single micro. The micro selected is the Southwest Technical Products Corp.'s S/09, a micro built around the Motorola 6809 microprocessor. The memory starts at 128K Bytes and is expandable up to 768KB.
The secondary memory currently consists of two 8 inch floppy disk drives which accommodate 1.2M Bytes each and a 16 or 32MB Winchester disk drive. Another soon-to-be-available data storage device for the S/09 is a streaming tape drive that will facilitate backing-up the hard disks. The capacity of each tape will be around 20MB. This piece of equipment will be available about the middle' of 1982.
The Sanders Technology Media 12/7 printer is used on the Serials Control System. This printer uses a "dot matrix" technique to produce letter-quality printing at speeds of from 30 to 240 characters per second depending on the font used.
The Serials Control System is written in the modern structured language Pascal and runs under Technical System Consultants' UniFLEX operating system. This microcomputer operating system was patterned after Bell Laboratories' UNIX operating system. Enhancements such as file and password protection were undertaken to make UniFLEX more "user friendly."
MetaMicro provides maintenance on all of the equipment it sells for the Serials Control System. It recommends that each customer purchase an auto-answer modem which MetaMicro can use for remote diagnostics of both hardware and software. Maintenance will usually consist of swapping complete components or printed circuit boards when feasible.
MetaMicro plans to provide interfaces with any other library system that agrees to cooperate with such an interface. Knowing that a stand-alone serials system does not meet the libraries' needs for "totally integrated" library systems, they will aggressively pursue interfaces with shared bibliographic services, circulation systems, and others. An interface with OCLC is already planned through the OCLC terminal' s serial printer port. MetaMicro has also worked with MARCIVE in San Antonio to transfer MARC records from their IBM computer to MetaMicro' s computer. This interface will enable MetaMicro to take MARC records on tape from any source and convert them into a form usable by the Serials Control System.
[Contact: MetaMicro Library Systems, Inc., 1818 San Pedro, San Antonio, Texas 78212. (512) 736-9309.]
