ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

NEW TECHNOLOGY

•Geomail is a newly formed commercial association of 25 private electronic mail system operators of the GeoNet Mailbox System, who are working toward establishing a fully international electronic mail service. Its present membership covers all of Europe and will shortly be expanded to systems in the United States, the Middle East, Australia, and the Far East. Some 10,000 subscribers are now supported. The continuous integration of telecommunication-based services (telex, facsimile, teletext, etc.) with electronic mail systems makes it important to find the most cost efficient routing of information. Geomail intends to create a full spectrum of optimized telecommunication packages for their operators and their subscribers. The service will use the X400 international standard for message handling services, developed by the Comité Consultatif International pour Telephone et Télégraphe. For more information, contact J. Hoffman, Geomail S.A., BP. 262 Luxembourg.

• IBM now offers an ASCII station that can display nearly twice as many characters per screen as other displays in the IBM 316X family. The new IBM 3162 display station is a general purpose terminal for use with computers using ASCII protocol. The 3162 can attach to the IBM Series/1, IBM Series/88, IBM PCs, and most non-IBM host computers. The station sells for $645.

IBM also announced a new function cartridge and keyboard that allows the IBM 3163 and 3164 models to display the ALA character set for terminal applications in libraries. The cost for the IBM 3163 model 860 is $976 and for the IBM 3164 model the cost is $1,376. Contact the IBM Systems Group, 900 King St., Rye Brook, NY 10573; (914) 934-4828.

• Lenco Energy Management has modified a portion of the 3d-floor flourescent lighting system at San Diego State University’s Love Library that may save over $42,000 annually in electrical costs. Lenco’s procedure involved removing the existing four flourescent bulbs and two ballasts from each fixture, then equipping the fixture housing with two custom-designed specular optical reflectors, a single solid-state ballast, and only two flourescent bulbs. The actual light output is only 3% less, but the energy savings are at least 50 %. Lenco Energy Management, located in Carlsbad, New Mexico, and serving the entire southern California area, specializes in retrofitting lighting systems.

• The Library Corporation has announced custom-designed enhancements to BiblioFile, the company’s desktop catalog system. The upgraded system allows a library to maintain an in-house catalog, establish a multi-station local area network, and laser print presorted catalog cards. Special features include a bar code reader to augment MARC records with circulation information, additional CD-ROM drives, and up to eight additional work stations. Contact: The Library Corporation, P.O. Box 40035, Washington, DC 20016; (800) 624-0559.

• NewsBank now has available a CD-ROM version of its database of over 500,000 newspaper citations that combines five years of NewsBank, Names in the News, and Review of the Arts on a single disk. The NewsBank Electronic Index uses an IBM PC with a Hewlett-Packard Thinkjet printer and a Hitachi CD-ROM player. For more information, contact NewsBank, Inc., 58 Pine St., New Canaan, CT 06840; (800) 243-7694.

• Sharp Electronics has introduced a compact, full-color copier with a suggested list price of $10,995. Designed with a thermal printing process that uses specially treated bond paper, the CX- 5000 can produce a full-color copy with a resolution of 300 x 300 dots-per-inch. The machine can also reduce by 50 % or enlarge portions of an original up to four times its size on a maximum copy paper size of 8 x 14 inches. The CX-5000 uses a four- color ribbon that features cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, and it can also create a two-color copy from a black-and-white source. Contact: Sharp Electronics Corporation, Sharp Plaza, Mahwah, NJ 07430; (201) 529-8920.

•University Microfilms International will release a CD-ROM version of its Dissertation Abstracts in January. The database, Dissertation Abstracts Ondisc, features citations and abstracts for 135,000 doctoral dissertations published from 1983 to 1986 and will be updated annually. The introductory price is $995. Contact: UMI, 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48106; (313) 761-4700.

•The University of Tulsa Libraries has completed the transport of their online integrated system, LIAS-TU, from Pennsylvania State University facilities to campus computer equipment in Tulsa. LIAS-TU is now a completely independent system, maintained locally. In addition to University of Tulsa holdings, by January 1 the system will contain the entire current and retrospective MARC file. Contact: Robert G. Anderl, Associate Director for Automation and Technical Services, University of Tulsa Libraries, Tulsa, OK 74104.

•The University of Toronto completed testing last March on a prototype micro-opaque card reader/printer that precludes the necessity of converting any of their library’s 1,038,500 microprints and 54,800 microcards to another format. Costs associated with converting only the most used segments of these collections had been calculated at $200,000, but the cost of the machine will only be about 5% of that. The equipment consists of a special modular carrier, light hood, and lens attachment for the Agfa-Gavaert COPEX LK P model reader/printer, which is marketed in the United States as a Bell & Howell model 5100 reader/printer. Using a dry toner reprographic process, the unit makes plain bond paper copies from microcard and microprint, comparable in quality to photoreproductions from microfiche. For more information, contact: M.I.C.R. Systems Ltd., 2255 Sheppard Avenue East, Suite W300, Willowdale, Ontario M2J 4Y1; (416) 496-1221.