Library Technology Guides
Document Repository
Volume 4 Number 03 (March 1984)
LSSI announces enhanced products and servicesGOAST: Geac Office Automation SystemLibrary Systems & Services, Inc., of Rockville, Maryland, and vendor of the MiniMARC stand-alone cataloging support system, has announced several enhanced products and services.
MiniMARC
The company has plans to utilize LaserData disks to replace their current microform index and the floppy disks on which the MARC data base is stored. This enhancement, expected to be available to customers by late in 1984, will require the addition of a videodisk drive and controller to the present hardware package but is not expected to result in any increased operating costs for users.
MiniMARC is the only available stand-alone automated cataloging support system on the market. As such, it provides an alternative to the bibliographic utilities as sources of machine-readable records, while providing the capability to modify records for local use, and to produce machine-readable records and card products.
Currently, MiniMARC provides its customers with LC MARC tapes reformatted to floppy disks for use as a source of bibliographic information. The system functions as a tool for creating adapted local records and for doing original cataloging. It is also potentially attractive for performing retrospective conversions of manual records to machine-readable form.
The basic computer system consists of a central processing unit, a three-drive floppy diskette unit, a CRT display and keyboard, and an optional printer. The disk drive contains the software, data base—read only to prevent erasure—and a blank diskette for storing local records. Under the Laser-Data enhancement, the floppy disk library and disk drive will be replaced by videodisk equipment. Since the entire MARC data base and the MiniMARC indexes can all be contained on a single videodisk, the changeover to the new format will essentially create an online system, eliminating the two-step process currently required to use MiniMARC.
The resource data base is now stored on over 1,300 floppy diskettes in a separate bookcase cabinet, with weekly updates also on diskette. To use the system, the appropriate diskette is identified by searching an index on a cartridge microfilm reader. Search keys include LC card number, author, or title (author and title are inter-filed). Once the appropriate diskette numbers and LC card numbers have been identified from the microfilm, bibliographic records are retrieved from the diskettes. Editing can be done at the terminal or records can be printed for off—line editing.
In the proposed enhancement, all 1,300 floppy diskettes will be replaced by a single videodisk containing both the MARC data base and the MiniMARC indexes. Preliminary design plans call for weekly updates to continue to be sent on floppies, which instead of being shelved would be used to load records into a small Winchester disk attached to the MiniMARC system. A software interface would then allow both the video-disk and the Winchester files to be searched automatically from the terminal, as in an online system, eliminating the need for microfilm lookups. Alternate designs that might eliminate the need for the Winchester are being studied before the final system configuration is determined.
LSSI President Frank Pezzanite believes that this enhancement will retain all the strengths of the MiniMARC system while overcoming the largest drawback—the manual lookup process. With an optional printer, the system can still be used for printing catalog cards, or the diskettes containing the local records can be sent to the vendor for reformatting to magnetic tape for subsequent production of a COM catalog. Interfaces for the transfer of records into any one of several turnkey automated library systems, including CLSI, DataPhase, Geac, VTLS, Sd, and Maggie's Place, will still be available, as will interfaces allowing the transfer of records from other bibliographic sources into MiniMARC.
Initial cost for new customers is expected to be no higher than for the present system, and present customers will be able to upgrade for only the cost of adding the videodisk drive and controller and the Winchester, if used. Current productivity averages of 35 to 40 records per hour, exclusive of bibliographic editing time, could be significantly improved. Libraries will still enjoy the advantage of being able to print out cards immediately if desired, rather than being required to set books aside to wait for cards to be received from a bibliographic utility.
LSSI hopes to keep the cost of the videodisk upgrade for curren MiniMARC customers to between $4,000 and $5,000. For libraries purchasing the complete package, anticipated costs for the laserdisk system are $35,000 for the hardware .(-excluding printer), $5,000 for the software license, and up to $13,000 for the data base. The data base cost is lower if less than the full MARC data base is selected. Background printing capability adds another $7,500 to the price tag. Weekly updates cost $4,620 annually, and average maintenance costs are $440 per month. Lease and lease—purchase arrangements are available.
MiniMARC is currently being used by more than 50 customers across the country. Although medium-sized public libraries were originally among the heaviest users, later purchasers included increasing numbers of processing centers and library systems doing centralized processing. Such users now account for approximately 20 percent of MiniMARC customers, with academic, special, and school libraries comprising another 40 percent of the client base. Pezzanite estimated that as many as 1,200 libraries may actually be acquiring their cataloging through M1niMARC.
MicroMARC
Last month, La Plata, Maryland, received the first installation of LSSI's new product, MicroMARC. LSSI has developed MicroMARC to offer an alternative to the purchase of card set packages from vendors such as Brodart and Baker & Taylor. MicroMARC is targeted at libraries that have thus far been priced out of automated cataloging by the high connect charges for searching bibliographic utilities.
The $500 MicroMARC software package is designed to run on the IBM PC or the Apple personal computer. It enables users to enter search keys— LCCN or author/title/imprint—during daytime hours and store them for overnight retrieval by LSSI. Each night LSSI polls all customers, retrieves search key codes, locates records from the MARC data base, and transmits the records to the user's microcomputer or directly into the library's circulation system. The library then processes the records as desired. This may include modifying records and printing cards and labels. A message function allows LSSI to notify the library of any items for which records were not found.
LSSI sees the advantages of this system as being the minimal hardware and software investment required, and the significant reduction in connect-time needed to use the system. Costs—exclusive of labor—are projected at about $1.00 per title plus connect-time, competitive with the cost of buying card sets from a vendor. Although MicroMARC is not yet being widely marketed, Pezzanite says interest has been strong, particularly from smaller academic libraries and school libraries.
More than Mini
Though long associated almost exclusively with MiniMARC in the minds of members of the library community, Library Systems & Services offers a number of other related services. In addition to MiniMARC and MicroMARC, LSSI has a community organization file management program and is developing a serials tracking service. The company also provides a complete range of library tape processing services. COM catalog production, archival tape processing, and conversion of non-MARC cataloging to MARC format are available. Tape processing currently accounts for about 10 percent of the company's business but represents the fastest growing component of the firm's activities.
Another significant area of LSSI's business is Contract Services, which accounted for approximately 30 percent of revenues in 1983. The company undertakes individual projects such as retrospective conversions on a bid basis. It also subcontracts for specific services. Currently, LSSI is the supplier of all technical services for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Library (FERC).
[Contact: Library Systems & Services Inc., 1395 Piccard Dr., Suite 100, Rockville, MD 20850. (800) 638—8725 or (301) 258—0200.]
Motorola announces wireless terminalStill the only major turnkey library automated system vendor to offer word processing capabilities as part of its integrated library automation system, Geac recently announced expansion into a new market, that of office automation.
The GOAST system will be configured on the Geac 6000 and 8000 minicomputers, those used in its banking and library applications. The software will offer word processing functions, including a dictionary feature for spelling verification. It is expected that files will be maintained and stored online. A variety of system security features will be provided, including the operator and terminal passwords common in the library environment.
In addition to word processing, GOAST also supports the UCALC spreadsheet analysis capability and an electronic mail module, GEM.
The announcement of Geac's entry into the office automation market should bode well for those sections of the library community that have been attracted to Geac automated library systems, at least in part, by the availability of its word processing software. The new effort, which concentrates on word processing as a major application, offers these users some assurance that the word processing software offered as part of the library system will be maintained and developed with a similar level of care as is applied by vendors whose main source of income is such office automation applications. Lack of such assurance had been a concern to libraries that desired the word processing feature in an integrated library system.
[Contact: Geac, 350 Steelcase Rd. West, Markham, Ontario, Canada L3R lB3. (416) 495—0525.]
IBM and DEC PCs now Serviced by XeroxMotorola has introduced a new wireless portable terminal capable of communicating with a host computer using digital radio signals rather than telephone lines. The Motorola PCX portable data communications system is battery powered and communicates via two-way radio link to a base station. The manufacturer indicates that such communication can be effective up to a distance of 7.5 miles.
The terminal uses two 8-bit microprocessors based on the 6801 design, weighs 28 ounces, runs all day on one battery charge, and costs between $3,000 and $4,000. It could be incorporated into an automated library system for shelf reading and inventory control.
Expert systemsXerox Corporation has announced that it will now service the IBM PC and XT personal computers and Digital Equipment Corporation's Rainbow 100 PC through its Americare program. The coverage is made available through dealers that wish to provide customers repair coverage on a contract or parts-and—labor basis.
Data base publishing using videodiskThe contributing editors were recently asked about “inference engines” and, after blushing about their ignorance, have determined that the term refers to a computer programming technique used in “expert systems.”
The so—called “expert systems” are computer systems that employ unique programming techniques to model expert decisions. The systems imitate human reasoning processes by asking for data about a problem or situation and then making deductions based on the information given.. A system designed to evaluate the likelihood of heart disease might ask about the patient's weight, smoking and drinking habits, stress levels, etc. The information is compared with a data base of accumulated information and then expressed as conclusions. The system is capable of displaying the rules used to reach the conclusions.
There are two components of an expert system: a “knowledge base” and an “inference engine.” The knowledge base is a store of accumulated information on a particular subject. The knowledge is expressed in a series of rules, usually in an “IF … THEN … form—in other words, deductive reasoning. These rules are entered into the system by human experts. The first (IF) part of the rule is a series of conditions: for example, the symptoms of an illness. The second (THEN) part of the rule will be a conclusion that can be deduced if the condition in the first part is met. The “inference engine” component of the system is the software necessary to carry out the comparison of data and rules and manipulate any probability facilities the system uses. The two parts of the expert system are separate so that knowledge bases and inference engines can be recombined depending on the requirements of a particular situation.
Expert systems are constructed by a team of specialists drawn from a subject area and from computer science. To date, the fields in which the most work has been done in the development of expert systems are medicine and petroleum exploration. However, there are examples of expert systems in fields as diverse as tax advice and the identification of organic compounds by analysis of mass spectrograms. While some systems are still quite crude, the best of them perform with a reliability level equal to that of human experts in a field. Most of the existing systems require quite large computers. Some 75 percent are mounted on Digital Equipment Corporation Model 10 and 20 computers. The company has been a leader in expert system research among hardware manufacturers. IBM has recently become more involved in the field. The so-called “fifth-generation” computers being developed in Japan and the U.S. are seen as being important components in the development of very complex expert systems.
The leading work in expert systems is going on in university artificial intelligence studies departments such as those at Stanford, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon universities. The Lister Hill Center for Biomedical Communications, the research and development arm of the National Library of Medicine, is also an active participant in research in this area. In the commercial sector, the Stanford Research Institute, Cognitive Systems Inc., Artificial Intelligence Corp., and Tecknowledge are leaders.
Turnkey address changesThe report in this issue of LSN on LSSI's plans to use a videodisk as the storage medium for its data base prompted the editors to prepare the following summary on the potential of videodisks for data base publishing. Related information on various aspects of optical and digital disk technology has appeared in previous issues of the Newsletter.
The storage of digital data on optical media can take many forms. While most of the attention has focused on the optical digital disk, digital information can be stored optically on a variety of materials. There are companies that are recording the information on slides and on strips of film. The variety of ways in which the data are being recorded has led to a new generic descriptive term: optical mass memory technologies.
Most computer specialists look upon optical mass memory as nothing more than a computer peripheral device similar to magnetic disk or tape storage, but it can also be used in electronic publishing if an economical means of replication can'be found. Only one of the various optical media has to date been replicated in other than the laboratory:
the digitally encoded optical videodisk. The advantage of using a videodisk as the medium is that there is so much standard equipment available for it. Every other optical mass memory technology involves the building of special hardware.
The pioneering commercial effort in using videodisk for the storage of digital data is by LaserData (see LSN, Vol. III, No. 8, pp. 59—61). It has developed a system for encoding high-density digital information within the video signal of a 12-inch plastic video-disk and duplicating the disk on commercial “pressing” facilities of the type used for creating entertainment and training disks.
The company claims that the Laser-Data system hardware costs less than one-tenth that of magnetic technology or alternative optical mass storage technology; that its full-text storage capacity is 30 times that of high-density magnetic tape; 2,000 times that of double-sided, double-density floppy disks; and 3,000 times that of microfiche.
LaserData uses a videodisk player as a microcomputer peripheral device— the standard, low-cost, mass-produced optical videodisk player of the type produced by Pioneer, Sony, Magnavox, and others.
The data can consist of digitized images or it can be machine-readable data encoded character by character so that it supports full text searching with user-friendly dialogs. The system can accommodate a combination of digital and analog information. For example, it has the ability to store photographs and illustrations, both in still-frame and motion video formats—with or without accompanying text.
A LaserData 100 Controller with DataDisc Player costs approximately $1.30 per megabyte (one million bytes or characters) of data, assuming that 4,800 megabytes of storage are put on a disk. That compares with $35.00 per megabyte for an IBM 3380 magnetic disk drive.
LaserData DataDiscs are available in four data capacities: A-800, L-1600, A-2400, and L-4800. (Numbers refer to capacity in millions of characters.)
The LaserData DataDiscs may be single- or double-sided. One single-sided disk produced in quantity costs approximately $80. The capacity of the L-4800, the largest capacity disk, can be as much as the equivalent of 2 million pages of full text if double-sided storage is specified. This is a theoretical capacity: the actual capacity is reduced by 20 percent to provide for error correction.
The cost of the LaserData L-4800 itself is less than $.02 per megabyte as compared with $4.00 per million characters using a CX 9766 removable magnetic disk pack, $2.00 per megabyte using a floppy disk, and $.20 using high-density 6250 bpi magnetic tape.
One of the great concerns with the optical storage media has been the error rate. It is one thing to lose a few characters in the middle of an image, but another to lose characters in the middle of a stream of data that has been encoded character by character. LaserData claims that it can achieve an error rate comparable to that achieved with other optical media, or one error in less than 10 disks after correction.
Most machine-readable data are currently delivered to remote users by shipping magnetic tape via commercial couriers or transmitting data over voice-grade telephone lines. The former is an inflexible medium that requires reloading onto magnetic disk in order to manipulate it effectively. The latter is expensive--usually $5 or more per hour.
The primary market is seen as publishers of reference works, directories, text, and periodicals for medical, legal, scientific, academic, engineering, and business professionals. A wide variety of applications is possible because the DataDisc system can accommodate full text (searchable to the word, if desired), combined text/ illustration, and video in both still-frame and motion video format.
LaserData provides two services: the encoding of information onto Data-Discs and the supplying of equipment— the videodisk player, the microcomputer, and the unique controller that links the two.
The DataDisc Mastering Service (DMS) is a proprietary means of encoding information onto a LaserData DataDisc and then duplicating that master DataDisc in the quantities specified by the client.
The LaserData line of products includes nine distinct systems tailored to the differing needs of potential end—users. Most are configured in “workstation” form and employ a selection of optical videodisk players linked by the controller to a professional—standard microcomputer. The average work station costs approximately $18, 000.
The minimum hardware configuration for retrieving the data includes the LaserData 100 Controller—the hardware linking the videodisk player to the micro—and the LaserData 101 Professional, a work station with a microcomputer, one terminal, and a single videodisk player.
A more sophisticated configuration such as the LaserData 102 Researcher includes four DataDisc players to quadruple the online capacity for data retrieval. It can also support three additional terminals. The LaserData 301 is a complete image retrieval and analysis work station with four players, which includes image processing software, high resolution display capability, and monitors with touch—sensitive screens for interactive programs.
One of the other unique features of the system is an encryption process designated DataDefender. A disk publisher can put several data bases on a single disk and provide a customer the access “keys” only for those data bases for which the client has purchased the rights.
Despite the apparent breakthrough, potential users should proceed with caution. The successful publishing of data bases using an optical mass memory technology will depend on a variety of factors, among them technical soundness, cost, user acceptance, and adherence to standards—de facto or established. The market as a whole is likely to hold back, pending clarification in all of these areas.
Early entrants may find it necessary to provide their customers with the hardware as part of an annual subscription fee, rather than depending on them to invest in the purchase of equipment.
Considerable progress is being made in the development of other optical technologies—in capacity, error rate, ease of replication, permanency, and cost. Today's picture may change dramatically by 1985. The wise system designer will provide for a data base that can be stored on any of several media and retrieved on any of several micros or CRTs. The data base is the publisher's long—term investment and ongoing concern.
The ability to access information on hardware that is usable for many other applications is generally the overriding concern of the data base user. The era of dedicated terminals is ending. Even Mead Data—the highly successful producer of LEXIS and NEXIS—has decided to move away from requiring a special terminal to access its files.
Despite these caveats, the Laser-Data product line is an impressive entry in the optical mass storage technology market and warrants careful investigation by any potential data base publisher.
[Contact; LaserData, Inc., 1 Kendall Square, Building 200, Cambridge, MA 02139. (617) 494—4900.]
Users want fax serviceThe following turnkey system vendors have changed their addresses and telephone numbers to those shown below:
CTI Library Systems, Inc.
8350 Archibald Ave.
Rancho Cucamonga, CA 91730
(714) 980—4556DataPhase
9000 West 67th St., 2d Floor
Shawnee Mission, KS 66202
(913) 262—5100DYNIX, Inc.
1455 West 820 North
Provo, UT 84601
(801) 375—2770
The University of Utah Libraries, participants in a statewide telefacsimile network, conducted a survey of users and determined that 252 of 311 respondents were interested in using telefacsimile for the delivery of items obtained on interlibrary loan, and that 75 percent of those would be willing to pay $3 to $5 per article. Greatest interest was expressed by graduate students, of whom 61 percent were willing to pay. An impressive 99 percent of off-campus users served were willing to pay for rapid service.
Publication Information
| Publisher | Library Systems Newsletter was published by the American Library Association. |
|---|---|
| Editor-in-Chief: | Howard S. White |
| Contributing Editor: | Richard W. Boss |
| ISSN: | 0277-0288 |
| Publication Period | 1981-2000 |
| Business model | Available on Library Technology Guides with permission of the American Library Association. |
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