First meeting of CDS/ISIS distributors in Europe and the Mediterranean area Viareggio, Italy
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb045154 |
| Pages | 179-180 |
| Published date | 01 March 1992 |
| Date | 01 March 1992 |
| Author | Zbigniew M. Nowicki |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
Conference Report
First meeting of CDS/ISIS
distributors in Europe and
the Mediterranean area
Viareggio,
Italy,
16-18
March
1992
Zbigniew
M.
Nowicki
Institute for
Scientific,
Technical and Economic
Information,
Warsaw,
Poland
In distributing its CDS/ISIS package, UNESCO cooperates
with various organisations all over the world which act as
CDS/ISIS distributors. These organisations fall into three ca-
tegories:
— national distributors who distribute the package in
their own countries;
— specialised distributors who serve particular user
communities (typically from various countries)
and usually provide them with their own
database(s);
— regional distributors who serve users in particular
geographical regions.
The main duty of each organisation is, of course, to pro-
mote and distribute CDS/ISIS in its area of operation. Dis-
tributors
also
provide other services
to
their user communities
— among the most common activities are general and ad-
vanced training courses, publications in national languages,
consultancy, meetings of various user groups and publication
of newsletters.
In order to provide information on the latest CDS/ISIS de-
velopment and to facilitate direct contacts between the dis-
tributors, UNESCO regularly organises meetings of the dis-
tributors in various geographical
regions.
Meetings have been
held previously in Latin America and Asia. The first meeting
of CDS/ISIS distributors from Europe and the Mediterranean
area was held in Viareggio, Italy from 16-18 March 1992,
sponsored and hosted by the Region of Tuscany. Viareggio is
a beautiful resort city located on the Tyrrhenian coast and it
was an excellent idea to bring all the distributors there during
the mild days of
March.
The meeting was attended by almost
50 people from various European organisa3tions and by one
representative of the Mediterranean region, from
Algeria.
The
meeting was chaired by Bernhard Ancel of the International
Trade Centre UNCTAD/GATT (Geneva, Switzerland). The
agenda included
a
report from UNESCO on version 3.0 of the
CDS/ISIS package, reports from distributors, and demonstra-
tions and recommendations on further software development.
Version 3.0 of CDS/ISIS was officially released during the
meeting. Giampaolo Del Bigio, UNESCO's CDS/ISIS Pro-
gramme Manager presented the new features of this version.
A major improvement is the support of a local area network.
The new version also makes use of the microcomputer's ex-
panded memory and some system restrictions have been con-
siderably relaxed. Many new procedures and functions are
available in the CDS/ISIS Pascal
language.
The user can tem-
porarily exit from the package
in
order
to
execute
a DOS
com-
mand or another program. All version 3.0's new features are
documented in the READ.ME file provided by UNESCO
along with the software.
As well as the full version of the package, UNESCO also
provided
the
ISISCD program which allows for searching and
printing only, as well as several application programs in the
CDS/ISIS Pascal language. Some of these may replace stand-
ard system functions in the package distributed among users.
One new procedure, ISISINST, will install the package auto-
matically, but the INSTALL batch file is still available for
manual installation.
UNESCO
also
distributed two new utility
programs:
FAN-
GORN, a utility for converting from ASCII to the ISO2709
format and SIMMONS, a utility for converting from CCF to
ISO2709 and vice versa.
Eight participants presented their own experiences and
achievements in distributing CDS/ISIS during a plenary ses-
sion and several written reports from various countries and
organisations were distributed among the participants. The
most impressive was a demonstration from Elvio Pozzana of
the Comune di Venezia (Venice, Italy), who presented the
union library catalogue for the Region of
Tuscany.
This cata-
logue is produced as a CDS/ISIS database on CD-ROM and
distributed every six months along with the EURISCO inter-
face which allows for easy searching, printing and download-
ing of information from this database.
In order to prepare recommendations on further develop-
ment of the CDS/ISIS package and its distribution the partici-
pants worked in groups. The following working groups were
established:
— on further CDS/ISIS development, chaired by
Jean-Pierre Mitsch from the Université
Catholique de Louvain (Louvain, Belgium);
The Electronic Library, Vol. 10, No. 3, June 1992 179
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