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When Libtech was bought by Reed International and rescheduled for March 1999 at the bigger, central London Venue of Olympia, vendors were pleased -
the Hatfield show had outgrown its original home and everyone looked forward to a show shared with the London Bookfair. In between times, Reed got cold feet and pulled out - selling the show on to Information
Today in November '98.
In record time the new organisers put together an impressive multi track conference and took over the organisation of the show. It was linked with Internet Librarian which has been so successful in the USA and the whole show came into being as originally scheduled. Most of the vendors this year were happy with the quality of attendees but would have liked to have seen more. Shows like this need time to get established and London needs a show that brings the technologies for libraries together under one roof. We hope it prospers.
Around the show there were no major launches but Notisoft - the only Lotus notes based Library system I know of, was demonstrating the latest
version of NOTEbookS which has been much improved since the version I reviewed a while back when it was first launched. A tighter look and feel has been achieved by re-working the "views" of the various databases that comprise the system. Although not based on relational technology, NOTEbookS allows authority control of thesaurus terms and names etc. via automatic batch updating of changed terms using the standard, well proven "agent" concepts.
The Lotus notes interface is also well proven and corporate librarians using Notes will feel very at home. A brief look only gave me time
to view serials checkin which was ergonomically presented.
On the searching side, there is an in-built Verity text search engine - very powerful and featuring saved searches. Another nice feature is the concept of "folders" for bibliographic records which can be e-mailed to users. Being a Notes based system, the integration of e-mail and other user driven services like requests is a major plus. And of course the concept of replication - keeping multiple separated databases "in synch" make this product essential to evaluate for anyone having to manage several small libraries scattered across the globe.
NOTEbookS uses BookWhere technology to allow Z39.50 searching for Internet resources and version 3 of this excellent search tool has now been
released and has several major improvements and new features.
The main new features are UK and UNIMARC handling, multi-lingual user options, batch ISBN searching and an open API to allow any library automation vendor to engineer BookWhere into their products - see review.
Ameritech were one of the few major vendors to be at the show and I managed a few words with Chris Ezekial about their experiences with the Citrix
technology that they alone seem to be using amongst the UK vendors. Chris is still very enthusiastic and it is good to see that the benefits of thin client technology - where the client application is run on
the server and the PC merely acts like a dumb terminal - are being realised in practice.
So, with no Geac, Innovative, Talis (ex BLCMP), or DS, it was left to the smaller (less complacent?) systems vendors like Endeavor, Ex Libris, EOSi,
Sirsi, Fretwell-Downing, plus the smaller UK suppliers Payne automation, Cairs, Adlib and Limes, Soutron and Softlink Europe (Alice) to provide a good range of system solutions.
Mot of the news was not around new products and technologies but rather about people and sales.
Look out for some interesting new sales for Endeavor and Ex-Libris - two companies that now appear to be leading the pack amongst major academic libraries in the UK.
Although not exhibiting, I heard from Mick Fortune that the Amicus product, that has until now been making news by winning National Library
contracts for Canada, UK and Australia, is now moving into a productised state - making it a potential competitor for mainstream academic libraries.
On he whole business is good for the library automation vendors in this corner of the world.
The main difficulty being faced by many suppliers is the lack of good librarians with energy and enthusiasm to move into the many jobs that are available - a story I also heard at the ALA in Philadelphia in January.
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