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> Email Message                                          The British Council
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> I would like to hear from anyone who has used Inmagic
> (or DB Textworks outside the USA) not so much as a
> database per se, but for either:
> a.) an online library catalog, or
> b.) an art collection catalog.
> Pros and cons would be welcome.
> Please reply to me at (<a href="/scripts/wa.exe?LOGON=A3%3Dind9706%26L%3DARLIS-L%26E%3D7bit7BIT%26P%3D300092%26B%3D--%26T%3Dtext%252FplainTEXT%252FPLAIN%3B%2520charset%3DUS-ASCII%26pending%3D" target="_parent" >[log in to unmask]</a>).
> If there is any interest I will report back my findings.
> Many thanks
> Clive Phillpot
> Visual Arts
> British Council, London, UK.
Clive,
We've had DB Textworks for about 2 years. we use it as a slide catalogue
in the slide library(part of the Art & Design library at Coventry
university).It's very user friendly and easy to understand.Search time
is fast, you can search with wild cards etc.and global editing is also
very quick.Record skeletons or "templates" cut down on the amount of
info to be typed in for each record. You can set up validation lists so
that certain fields have a restricted vocabulary-we use this function
for fields such as "art movement", "category" etc.The help desk service
is very good although expensive.We'll take it out for one more year
because we want to set up an issue system. We are bar-coding all the
slides (this gives us a unique number for the database record) but are
still using manual issue.For anything which you have problems with the
help desk will put together some software and send it to you on a
floppy. You can then load it on to the database.Report
writing/generating is easy. We print labels for the slides. We also send
returns to DACS, listing the number of slides we have added to the
collection under their scheme, with very little effort. Password control
allows search only facility as well as search/edit. DB Textworks version
1 which we have is not year 2000 compliant. Rather than upgrade to
version 2 we are going to wait for version 3 which will be available
shortly.  Hope this helps.
 Regards.
Stephanie Silvester
Sub Librarian Art & Design
Coventry University