News
| Pages | 348-357 |
| Published date | 01 June 1991 |
| Date | 01 June 1991 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb045103 |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
News
Information specialists
rewarded
British information specialists and li-
brarians in business information are re-
cession-proof,
according to a new sur-
vey from TFPL. From a field of 600
professionals queried, TFPL found that
78%
had had pay rises over the past
year. Salaries and fringe benefits rose a
whopping 18% on average over the
eighteen months between April 1989 to
October 1991. The majority had in-
creases between 5-9% — however, a
lucky few (17.5%) enjoyed rises of 10-
25%.
Given the economic climate, the
proportion of survey participants who
had recently received salary increases
(78%) and the generosity of these in-
creases seems to indicate that organis-
ations are valuing their information spe-
cialists now more than ever, says TFPL.
TFPL's Business Information Salary
Survey for 1992 found that salaries are
surprisingly even across the sectors
(architecture, banking & finance, ac-
countancy, insurance, professional
bodies, advertising and law) and that
there is little difference in pay between
men and women. This is good news for
women, but not too surprising in a pro-
fession they still dominate. Fringe bene-
fits are relatively generous. About one
third of those surveyed receive over-
time pay, nearly half get a yearly bonus
on average of
£1112,
and over half have
21-25 day holidays.
According to the survey, the number
of people you are responsible for seems
to outweigh all other factors — qualifi-
cations, years of experience, etc —
when it comes to determining salary
level.
No.
of staff Median salary
responsible for in £
0
14
000
1-2
18
900
3-4 22 000
5-10 26 500
11+ 30 000
Business Information Salary Survey
1992:
Salaries and fringe benefits for
business information specialists and li-
brarians. London: TFPL, 1991. 33pp.
£50.00, ISBN 1 870889 27 4.
Is it the 90s yet?
As always, as we approach the begin-
ning of
a
new year the media try to sum
up what has been and predict what will
come. We like the answer one BBC
radio interviewer received when she
asked her
guests
to define the
90s:
'Who
can
say?
They haven't happened yet.' In
that spirit, we present here a collection
of some of the new products and devel-
opments launched in late 1991 that we
think say something about the
90s.
As to
predictions, we will leave those up to
you.
CDTV
Commodore and Matsui are working
to set up a CDTV Consortium in Japan.
Their aim is to promote and develop
CDTV players and titles there. They
have been joined already by Dai-Nip-
pon, one of the world's largest printing
companies. Japan Electronics Publish-
ing and PCM Complete are two of the
developers working on software titles.
Meanwhile, the Los Angeles soft-
ware publisher Tiger Media launched a
version of its award-winning murder
mystery for the European market. Air-
wave Adventure: The Case of
the
Cau-
tious
Condor
is
the package and it
is
used
on the European Commodore CDTV
player. Your task is to find out whodunit
based on the clues you pick up from the
cartoon-type characters as they speak
and interact with the gumshoe
hero,
Ned
Peters.
You
have just
30
minutes to solve
the mystery, just like in a typical Ameri-
can TV show. The time limit was set,
according to Tiger Media, to make Con-
dor
a
viable alternative to
TV.
What else
from LA where real life has to compete
as a viable alternative to TV?
One more item on CDTV: Commo-
dore reduced the price of its Amiga-
based CDTV to £500 in the UK. This is
£100 less that the original launch price.
The move came at the start of
a
massive
pre-Christmas advertising campaign.
Optical storage
Digipress, the French company that de-
veloped Century-Disc for storing data
optically at least a hundred years, has
now come up with a medium for even
longer archiving: Eon-Disc. It is an
etched, non-metallised glass CD de-
signed to protect and preserve data for
centuries, maybe even millenia, accord-
ing to Digipress. Ongoing access to data
on the Eon-Discs is a no-no. Since they
are transparent, they can't be read on
standard CD players. To access them
you need either
a
special player with ten
times more laser light intensity than
standard players or to get the discs me-
tallised. (This makes us wonder what
the user in year 2592 might do with the
pretty glass
discs.
Is
this why the price is
only $180 per disc compared
to
$300 for
the Century-Disc which does allow on-
going access?)
Rank Xerox has designed an optical
storage system for use on ships. It
is
part
of four systems now being tested by the
Royal Navy: one on a submarine, two
on ships and a fourth onshore. The sys-
tems have been designed to manage on-
board technical documentation, and it's
little wonder. The Royal Navy recently
estimated that a modern frigate carries
in excess of 2000 technical handbooks,
35 000 engineering drawings, several
hundred catalogues and spares lists as
well
as
hundreds of files recording busi-
ness specific to each ship.
The system designed by Rank Xerox
includes Sun IPX workstations, Inter-
leaf ViewStation software with printers,
a ScanWorX Intelligent character rec-
ognition system from Xerox Imaging
Systems, scanners, optical disc systems
and portable
PCs.
If all goes well during
348 The Electronic Library, Vol. 9, No. 6, December 1991
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