Narodni lekarska knihovna


Institution name: Contact persons: Aleph Configuration

Results

The licence agreement between NLK and ExLibris was signed on September 30, 1994. DEC Computer was delivered only on November 1, 1994. Aleph system was installed on November 28, 1994. The folloving delivery of new workstations was delayed, resulting in their installation as late as by the end of January and during February 1995.

The first training session (January 16-19, 1995) was conducted by Ms. K. Moszczynska of ExLibris. Her cooperation with NLK's departments of automation and cataloguing reasulted in February in working out the database structure for storing MeSH thesaurus. In June the Czech version of MeSH was converted to Aleph as well as other authority files - publishing companies and corporate files.

The language vocabulary has been conceived as a supportive aid for cataloguing. Authority files functions have been checked in EXP basis containing samples of records produced by the National Library, Prague and also NLK's own experimental records.

Comparison of data in MAKS and UNIMARC has been a starting point for setting up our own structure of catalogue records database. The list of obligatory NLK data elements for UNIMARC has been compiled.

Since April 1995 NLK has been connected to Internet. Pathwork installation on all workstations will be finished by the end of August. In July Aleph Mosaic server was tested in LAN on some stations and this work will proceed on other stations in August.

Future plans

Until the end of 1995 we are planning to test fully cataloguing module using the completed authority files.

Open problems

We have encountered serious problems resulting from high memory requirements of Aleph - sometimes more than 8 MB per one station. This will be defined with more precision as soon as cataloguing is fully operational.

We would like to make retrospection conversion of some 160,000 journal article entries to Aleph but these plans are being hampered by the facts that UNIMARC does not include generally accepted codification of the contents of journal article records. The capacity of Aleph concerning production of more complex bibliographies seems to be limited. There ensues a problem how to process the monthly Czech Medical Bibliography out of records converted to Aleph.

Prague, July 27, 1995 O. Pinkas


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