News
| Date | 01 April 1996 |
| Pages | 293-297 |
| Published date | 01 April 1996 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb045482 |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
News
The electronic library
scene
Personal Bibliographic Software
(PBS) is no more, its assets having
been acquired by Research Informa-
tion Systems (RIS), a subsidiary of
ISI.
RIS has assumed full responsibil-
ity for managing the PBS product line.
The products themselves include
ProCite, a PC-based personal bibliog-
raphic database management pro-
gram; BiblioLinks, a set of programs
used to import reference data from on-
line,
CDROM and diskette-based
services into ProCite, and the recent
Internet Enabler, which offers access
to the bibliographic information avail-
able on the World Wide Web. RIS
stresses that these products are thor-
oughly compatible with RIS and ISI
products, and that 'many of our cus-
tomers are satisfied and enthusiastic
ProCite customers, and rely heavily on
this bibliographic software.' In other
words, PBS may be no more but its
software lives on and doesn't look as if
it is going to be phased out in the near
future: indeed, RIS intends to release a
Macintosh upgrade to ProCite as
quickly as possible.
A research project under the UK's
eLib Programme brings together key
publishers on library automation and
information management to create a
new information service for the LIS
community. The aim of the
NewsAgent for Libraries project is to
create a user-configurable electronic
news and current awareness service
with a mixture of content streams, in-
cluding metadata. Content will in-
clude refereed and other papers, re-
views,
and editorial matter from UK
journals in the field, including VINE
and the Journal of Librarianship and
Information Science. News and
brief-
ing materials will be provided by the
Library Association, ISI, UKOLN, the
British Library and the Library In-
formation Technology
Centre:
these
all already produce printed publica-
tions in this field, and are developing
Web sites.
The service will consolidate the
editorial skills of libraries as academic
publishers and extend their awareness
of electronic publishing issues. An ap-
propriate system will be developed for
copyright management, along with
systems for information management,
user administration and billing.
A sixth supplier has been added to
the OCLC FirstSearch service in the
form of The UnCover Company. Un-
Cover depends exclusively on fax de-
livery of articles and will send ordered
articles to a designated fax machine
within 24 hours. OCLC added it so as
to offer more choice to FirstSearch us-
ers and sees it as enhancing the serv-
ice,
which is designed for library pa-
trons without training or experience to
search online. OCLC's vice president
Rick Noble said that UnCover was
added 'in response to user
libraries'
re-
quests.'
Contracts and
installations
BLCMP's
Talis
system has gained its
50th library in the form of an existing
customer of 14 years' standing. The
University of Sheffield invited tenders
for a new system last year, requiring a
system with 'extensive core function-
ality and the appropriate building
blocks for future development': Talis
was apparently the answer. Between
February and May this year Talis
signed up seven libraries, of which
five were entirely new customers and
two were migrating from the old BLS
system. BLCMP now has over 70
member libraries and Talis has 50 us-
ers.
Another of which is Clare County
Libraries — the first public library in
Eire to select the system. It is also one
of the country's largest, with 15
branches and a local studies centre that
serves a population of 90 000. A key
factor in the decision to go for Talis
was BLCMP's database of
14
million
bibliographic records, which would
speed the retrospective conversion
process for the county's quarter of a
million items. Another element was
the Talis Web OPAC.
Online and Internet
resources
OCLC's NetFirst directory of In-
ternet information resources is to be
hosted online by NISS. NetFirst cur-
rently contains descriptions of over
50 000 Internet resources, and is
growing at around 1000 entries per
week.
The NetFirst service on NISS was
released in June. It is available free of
charge to all staff and students in UK
Higher Education, but sites will need
to register.
Meanwhile, OCLC's PURL soft-
ware may now be licensed free of
charge and can be downloaded from
the World Wide Web at
http://purl.oclc.org (not to be con-
fused with the programming language
PERL, this is a tool for managing In-
ternet addresses and aliases). A PURL
is a Persistent Uniform Resource Lo-
cator and protects against URLs
changing and becoming invalid: in-
stead of pointing directly
to
an Internet
location, as a URL does, a PURL
points to an intermediate Resolution
Service which associates the PURL
with the actual URL regardless of
what the URL is called. It
is
very simi-
lar to an
e-mail
alias.
OCLC's FirstSearch and EPIC
services are to host the RILM Ab-
The Electronic Library, Vol. 14, No. 4, August 1996 293
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