[Isis-users] about ABCD v2.0b

[De Smet Egbert]

Dear all,

with my best wishes for a good year 2015 I am happy to announce availability of ABCD v2.0beta.
This has been on its way since quite long in fact. One of the main new features, justifying the 'major' upgrade to '2', i.e. the 'full-text' digital library feature, was already demonstrated by myself in an international conference (in New Delhi, India) 3 years ago... but kept hanging in for long time for reasons explained below.

We have now finalized two main scripts for this 'digital library' feature :
- a script (using Tika Server from Apache) which loads all documents in a pre-defined folder on the ABCD-server, preserving the underlying structure of sub-folders as searchable 'sections' of the 'repository', into a database with the existing metadata (embedded into the documents, as far as available in DC) and - if included into the field-selection based on Dublin Core - the complete text-extraction into a dedicated field which will be full-text indexed. After a full-index generation of the newly created database, which goes reasonably fast as we use the /n option of CISIS (MFN as the only posting), the database can be fully used in ABCD Central (e.g. editing metadata) and searched/displayed in the ABCD iAH-OPAC.
- another script will allow to interactively upload one or more documents from a (local) machine to the ABCD-server and have it incorporated into the database mentioned above. So after initial creation of a collection with this script the collection-database can be gradually updated with new documents.
- individual records ('documents') can be 'protected' by a password field in the record to allow self-submission of documents by authors without jeopardizing the records by other authors (an ABCD 'profile' to only allow data-entry access to the repository database is to be created).

Other good news about this version 2.0b :
- added : module 'Online Document Delivery Services' (ODDS)
- added : new module OAI (Isis-OAI-Provider from BIREME)
- added : thesaurus feature (Guilda's thesaurus consultation during data-entry and/or searching)
- added : several new utilities creating loanobjects/copies databases,
- added : duplication checker
- added : barcode checker (for stock-taking)
- added : record-splitter based on repeatable field
- soon to be added : RFID/SIP2 functions for automation of loan-functions by robots
- soon to be added : LDAP functions
- soon to be added : Unicode support.
with most of the new utilities 'made in Cuba'.

However there is also some bad news : some new features, based on non-standard versions of the CISIS-utilities of BIREME, don't fully function correctly, more specifically :
- searching in iAH works well but calling exactly the same searches from ABCD Site with its 'meta-search' feature as a URL, this doesn't work for an unknown reason;
- non-standard CISIS-databases do not work properly in Isis-OAI-Provider (probably for the same reason as the previous issue : they are accessed by a 'search-URL');
- Unicode is still to be tested much more by experts of non-Latin languages.

In fact these three pending issues have made me delay to publish of this version for now about 2 years, but I no longer can justify such delay any further. If people are really interested in using these new features in ABCD, they will have to add their voices to mine (which was too weak clearly) by asking BIREME to check for this. I only got the disappointing advice to use 'ISIS1030' type of 'LILACS'-style database, therefore foregoing all new modern non-traditional library uses of ISIS in ABCD and putting us back into the 80's... The main special versions of CISIS to be considered are 'BigISIS' (big records and databases, only available for Linux), 'FFI' (big records for Windows but without incremental indexing) and Unicode CISIS. Since BIREME is moving out of their 'BVS Site' (the one used in ABCD) the problem of the Site (as much as we could verify/test only when doing meta-search to non-standard CISIS databases) has very low priority, however since also OAI seems to be affected with a similar problem, we hope they will still address the issue as this is also relevant for their own network of the BVS.
I have not been able to convince BIREME of the importance of the possibility to fully use 1Mb-records in ISIS as done in BigISIS and FFI (while this was nevertheless part of the initial ABCD-contract and therefore always has been the idea). I am afraid it will take many more voices to still convince them.

I am availing this new version 2.0beta from my server abcd.netcat.be/files. Other than the mentioned issues, which do not affect normal operations of all other basic ABCD-functions, this version is fully compatible with (because based on) version 1.4.

Also a new downloads-page is created with a new 'tab' for documentation. One important new document is a manual on EmpWeb (draft version for comments) but the new v2.0b features still need to be added to the manual of ABC of ABCD, which we hope to do in the coming few months.

Please feel free to send me feedback.

Egbert de Smet
Universiteit Antwerpen

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