EVALUATION OF UNESCO'S CDS/ISIS AND SOME INMAGIC TEXT STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL PRODUCTS
Cao Minh Kiem
Division for R&D Information Management and Services
National Center for Scientific and Technology
Information and Documentation (NACESTID)
Hanoi, Vietnam
E-mail: hanoi!ifi.edu.vn!syfed!lkthanh@postbox.anu.edu.au
Michael Middleton
School of Information Systems
Queensland University of Technology
Brisbane, Australia
E-mail: middle@fit.qut.edu.au
http://www.fit.qut.edu.au/InfoSys/middle
CDS/ISIS is a well-known textual information storage and retrieval software in the developing countries and evaluated as a "very powerful and versatile program" (Sievets et al, 1991). Its Windows version WINISIS 1.0 is still in testing and evaluation stage. INMAGIC PLUS is among the best-selling library software in the United States and a number of other countries. The Inmagic's windows product, DB/TextWorks, includes new features such as "relational-like" database linking, integrated image management, and other.
The evaluation indicates that the packages are powerful software for structured textual information management. They have similarities in their basic features while having a number of distinguishing features.
Features common to both software include: suitability for the management of structured textual information with variable record length; users define their own databases;, powerful search facilities with the use of Boolean and proximity operators allowing flexible and diverse search combination; customization of output format, especially formats that are specific and characteristic for library and information work like indexes and sorts; editor capacity allowing users to enter new data and edit existing data. Distinguishing features are: Inmagic's products have more extensive on-line help and are more user-friendly, particularly when comparing DOS versions; Inmagic's products handle more data types, which make them more flexible to use for purposes (e.g. administrative) other than conventional bibliographic databases; some searching features of Inmagic are more powerful than that in CDS/ISIS, for example range search and comparison; Inmagic products can produce reports in tabular format that are not available with standard CDS/ISIS systems; CDS/ISIS and WINISIS have strong and diverse indexing techniques which can meet various requirements and a programming facility enabling customization to meet specific needs including interfaces; CDS/ISIS and WINISIS have language version other than English for interfaces; the Thesaurus searching module written with CDS/ISIS Pascal gives the software the ability to use a Thesaurus for information searching