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<p>Dear ISIS-users list colleagues,</p>
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<p>2020 has been an extremely difficult year for both professional and personal life for many, if not all, of us. </p>
<p>The promised release of a new version of ABCD, i.e. version 2.2, has been delayed time and again due to canceled workshops and many other corona-related problems. </p>
<p>However since September tests have been ongoing, albeit at very low scale, and we think that at this moment we can offer a beta-release for wider testing and use. </p>
<p>The most important changes/innovations of version 2.2. can be listed as : </p>
<p>- inclusion of the completely new ABCD OPAC, which can replace mostly both Site and iAH, since it offers combined searching of ABCD-databases (with merged indexes), facets and other features.</p>
<p>- this version offers a co-ordinated, synchronized combination of the versions 1.5 and 2.1; it will be the only basis for further development (so the series 1.x is now finished); all features of 1.5 and 2.1 are preserved and streamlined.</p>
<p>- reorganization of the many utilities in a new tabbed-menu structure</p>
<p>- <span>various nice improvements are now offered, such as a read-only PDF-viewer, improved full-text extraction of also larger documents, DSpace records import etc.</span></p>
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<p>Unfortunately we detected some problems in other modules of ABCD due to changes and the technological software-environment and external libraries, affecting EmpWeb, Site-Admin (in Windows only) and Secs-Web. Only partial solutions are currently available
: </p>
<p>- for EmpWeb, where the combination of a newer Java with MySQL no longer allows transactions, we strongly recommend keeping the old environment where everything worked perfectly;</p>
<p>- for Site-Admin in Windows, where an unknown problem with the XSL-library prevents part of the menus to be shown, we can only advise manual edition of the Site configuration files (the HTML and XML files, which are all in text-format and therefore can also
be edited with simple text-editors) or using the Site/Admin in Linux - working fully as before - and copying the resulting configuration files in bases/site to the Windows environment; in some cases the new OPAC with its improved meta-search capabilities could
make the use of Site much less important anyway;</p>
<p>- for Secs-Web (rarely used nowadays) we offer in the 'added' databases of 2.2 the same databases but directly managed with Central; a script to regenerate the holding-records from the command-line is available, so most of Secs-Web functionality is preserved
but dedicated documentation is still missing.</p>
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<p>On the old download-page of ABCD, i.e. <a href="http://abcd.netcat.be/files/downloads.html" class="OWAAutoLink" id="LPlnk49140" previewremoved="true">
http://abcd.netcat.be/files/downloads.html</a> new links to the Debian package and the Windows ZIP archive (containing the new folders) for downloading and testing. Both are meant to be installed on existing ABCD installations. Full installation packages will
need to follow later. </p>
<p>In principle existing databases won't be affected, but some new database-folders - e.g. for the added messages in 'lang' and for the new opac in 'opac' and 'opac_conf', but also the Secs-Web databases - will be installed in a folder 'bases_added' to be copied
into the operational bases-directory manually. Backing up the existing bases-directory before running the 'dpkg -i' command for installing the Debian package, is a good idea always, anyway. </p>
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<p>We hope for some more feedback on this beta-release - it should be basically sound while details can still be wrong but remedied - and when fully stable the documentation in the 'The ABC of ABCD' manual will be updated with an additional chapter on the new
OPAC and some minor updates on the existing Central module. Documentation on the OPAC is however available at the ABCD Wiki and a rich 'help'-function - now available in more languages through Google translate built-in - combined with a configuration wizard
should allow good guidance of the configuration process. </p>
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<p>We wish you all a happy new year 2021 !</p>
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<div class="PlainText">Egbert de Smet<br>
Universiteit Antwerpen</div>
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