The Electronic Library Manager's Guide to New Information Technology Products in 1991
| Pages | 299-299 |
| Published date | 01 June 1991 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb045087 |
| Date | 01 June 1991 |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
Editorial
The Electronic Library
Manager's Guide to New
Information Technology
Products in 1991
The year 1991 introduced some interesting multimedia opti-
cal information products which are worth drawing attention
to again, even though their use and potential might not be
totally apparent at the present time.
A
new trend seems to
be
the growing number of interactive
multimedia
magazines.
Time
Magazine brought out
a
full col-
our multimedia magazine called Desert Storm: the first draft
in history which gives a week-by-week coverage of the Gulf
War with text stories, photos, maps, original dispatches and
recordings from correspondents. Nautilus is a multimedia
magazine on CD-ROM which allows subscribers (who pay
$120 per
year)
to access and contribute information, software,
games, music, commentary, reviews etc. Other similar inter-
active magazines on CD-ROM include Macworld Inter-
active,
Verbum
Interactive
1.0
and New Media Age.
While not CD-ROM based, the following product might
conceivably qualify
as
optical!
In San Francisco, 900 pages of
news about high-tech subjects will be 'printed' on every TV
set tuned to KOFY-TV. Viewers are supposed to tape the 30-
second broadcast and play it back as still frames. There are no
paper, printing or distribution costs — just the cost of
the
30-
second after-midnight TV slot. Revenues are expected to
come from the ads in the magazine. One other electronic
multimedia journal comes from Australia, where a PC maga-
zine is being made available on newsstands in floppy disk
form.
Newer technologies which fuse together me concepts of
computer-based interactive tablets, 8 or 12 cm CD-ROMs
and/or smart magnetic and optical cards amongst others are
becoming available in the shape of hand-held electronic
books. Among the products are the Active Book, Compact
Reader, OptiCard, Data Discman, Smart Book and RED.
Sony's battery-powered Data Discman is based on the port-
able CD player, Discman, and features a 10-line display and
six different search functions. It costs $300 and comes with an
English-Japanese dictionary on disk. Some 30 other elec-
tronic book titles are currently available ranging in price from
$18-130.
Reddy Information Systems' product RED is a wearable,
hands-free CD-ROM delivery system with
a
head-up display,
a real-time text-to-speech capability in English, French or
Spanish, a zero-motion mouse and a memory card for instant
updates of
the
CD-ROM information. RED is a combination
of the Walkman, CD-ROM and Reflex Technology's Private
Eye.
RED provides interactive, multimedia and hypermedia
presentations and allows the user to review text, graphics,
animation and audio information. The CD-ROM can be worn
on the belt or wrist while the display is worn on the head. The
system is DOS-based and has ports for keyboard, monitor and
printer and can be battery or mains powered. Besides the CD-
ROM/CD audio drive it has a smart card drive and the mono
display gives 720 x 256 pixels for bitmap graphics and text or
25 lines of 90 characters. Voice recognition and PC connec-
tion with the CD-ROM are options.
Kodak brought out Photo CD —
a
system aimed at provid-
ing professional photographers with copies of their work on
optical disc. Jointly developed with Philips and scheduled to
become available in 1992, Photo CD is a system which scans
35mm photographic images on slide or print films and writes
them to a compact disc which can contain up to 100 high-
resolution digital images. Partially filled discs can be re-
turned to the processing lab to have additional images added.
The Photo CD disc is compatible with other CD-ROM archi-
tectures and the images can be viewed on TV screens using a
Photo CD player (which will also be capable of playing audio
compact discs), on CD-I players as well as on CD-ROM XA
players. This means that the photographic images can easily
be incorporated into documents containing text and graphics.
The cost of the special players is to be under $500 with the
cost of each disc containing up to 24 images under
$15.
The impact that such technologies are having
is
not great at
the moment, although a growing number of publishers are
turning to both CD-ROM and optical cards to publish refer-
ence works such as encyclopaedias and dictionaries, tax
guides, maintenance manuals, literary works and transport-
ation timetables and the like. The possibility also exists for
customising such media so that users can obtain their own
personalised choice of
literature,
images or
music.
However,
home use for interactive journals is considered doubtful at
present because of the price (Verbum Interactive costs
$49.95) and because domestic users probably do not require
the advertisements which help keep the cost of journals down.
On the other hand, use of such interactive magazines in li-
braries, especially if they were networked, might avoid the
well-known problems of circulating periodicals.
Let's see what products 1992 brings — in the meantime,
Happy New Year!
D.
Raitt
The Electronic Library, Vol. 9, No. 6, December 1991 299
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