Re: finding files

[Dorothy Day day@xxxxxxxx]

On Mon, 15 Nov 1999, Robert Holmgren wrote:

>
> On Thursday, 11 November 1999, Ms. Day wrote:
> 
> > Orbis creates a textbase index for selected files . . .
>
> Dorothy, in four (4) sentences, could you explain the essential function
> of Orbis, as distinct from Ibid, as opposed to Ibid +, contrasted with
> Lingua? With possibly a fifth for BookWhere, if you can spare the time?
> Just the core Ideas. Thank you very much. Yr hmbl servant,
>

Not in 4 sentences, no. Alas, no time to be so succinct.

Orbis does full-text (every word) indexing of the files you select. It's
essentially fieldless, except that you *may* use some minimal keyword
tagging so that you can later search only those words. If you accept the
default paragraph chunking of data (one or two carriage returns serve as
delimiters), you don't really have to prepare the files for indexing at
all. (There are alternate ways of designating text units.) When you
search for terms (or boolean combinations of terms), every "chunk"
containing terms from that query is queued for viewing and selection;
the terms are highlighted.

Ibid/Ibidem is a bibliographic database, with a flexible-length field
for each bibliographic element, completely customizable. The annotation
field effectively can be almost any length; other fields have limits,
but I've never hit one. Only the author, title, and year fields are
actually indexed; searching the entire record involves an extremely fast
full text search of the file(s). The program supplies fill-in templates
for adding records and aids for searching and designing output forms;
these too can be customized.

Ibid Plus provides similar control over much more diverse types of data,
and allows creation of "authority files" of frequently used data for
each field. Ibidem has now added this authority control functionality
for bibliographic dbs. Sample fill-in templates are provided for
databases of opera recording collections, law cases/clients, address
books, and anthropological field notes.

Bookwhere is a separate program that searches multiple Online Public
Access Catalogs running on Z39.50 servers (which use the Z39.50 gateway
standard for handling query commands--translates them into common
terminology to execute and return results). Retrieved records can be
displayed in native MARC format, or that of several bibliographic
management programs (e.g. Ibid, ProCite, Reference Manager, EndNotes).
Selected records can be inserted into an existing Ibidem database,
properly tagged and delimited.

Lingua actually modifies and enhances NB to be able to work in
transliterated and non-Roman scripts (to date, Greek, Hebrew, and
Cyrillic). E.g. in Hebrew editing mode, characters are entered and
displayed right to left, with joinings appropriate to the character's
position within the word. Thousands of multiple-accented character
combinations are supported for transliteration of the world's languages.
The Windows version will have access to Windows fonts and printer
drivers, so should be quite different from the Dos version in current
use. I understand it will be demonstrated at the biblical scholars'
conferences this month, so attendees will probably report on it in a
couple of weeks.

Sorry--easier to be prolix when short on time.

	Dorothy



*****
Dorothy Day			School of Library & Information Science
day@xxxxxxxx					   Indiana University
*****
	"He also surfs who only sits and waits."

 Oct 11, 1999: According to John Roth, chief executive of Nortel
 Networks, an estimated 2.5 billion hours were wasted online last
 year as people waited for pages to download.