Caveat: This posting might be useful mainly to listers from Universities
and Colleges in India who have participated in the INFLIBNET
(Information and Library Network) of the UGC (Universities
Grants Commission). Others might find it, only of peripheral
interest.
Greetings,
Libraries attached to academic institutions who have been using
the CDS/ISIS software suite for textual searches on DOS and Windows
(WINISIS) might be happy to know that a replacement is (or has been for
some time) at hand: WWWISIS (http://www.bireme.br) runs on Linux and can
(almost?) do everything that CDS/ISIS could do. Over the past week, we
have developed all html screens and scripts in the ISIS formatting
language to invert, index, search and update an ISO-2709 interchange
format database. By the way, we by no means are the first to do it.
The advantage (IMHO) of WWWISIS over CDS/ISIS or WINISIS is:
1) One can now offer library catalogue search and COPSAT
abstract search services over a network. WWWISIS integrates
beatufully with Apache+CGI.
2) The cruddy and severely unforgiving CDS/ISIS data-entry forms
can be replaced by their friendlier HTML counterparts.
3) WWWISIS is free. Linux is Free. And we dont charge for help ;).
Universities and Colleges with ISO-2709 (UNESCO-3.07) databases
of their holdings and in particular, subscribers of the
excellent COPSAT (an abstracting service offered by the NCSI)
who were considering upward migration to costly library
mangement software like Libsys might find this an exciting
option.
In case you or your institution uses CDS/ISIS or subscribes to COPSAT and
would like to know more about this, do write to me and we would be happy
to share our eperiences.
Regards
Gurunandan
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