Hello.
Here at Eton College a number of the Collections team use the programme
Idealist for cataloguing and answering inquiries. It is used for the
archives, the photographic archives, the pictures, and other miscellaneous
items such as silver. The current version of Idealist has a number of bugs,
which are frustrating. Idealist used to be owned and developed by
Blackwells, but has apparently been sold to a company called Bekon in
Macclesfield. Calls to this company to find out when a de-bugged version of
the programme can be expected have produced no information, and recently the
calls haven't been answered. Calls to Blackwells have also produced no
answers to our questions.
I have two questions:
1. Does anyone have any current information about the state of play with
Idealist? (Which company currently owns it (if any), whether we can expect a
de-bugged version at any stage, etc.)
2. Has anyone used this programme, and switched to something else? The
staff who use Idealist are keen to find a substitute that is similar to it,
as, apart from the bugs, it suits their purposes very well. Due to the
diverse nature of the material which is catalogued onto it, the programme
has to be flexible with regard to the fields which can be put together in a
template, and also has to cope with longish fields (ideally more than the
255 characters that some databases will cope with). We have a MARC-based
system for the library, but something that is not so structured would be
better.
Any help will be very much appreciated. Please send replies to me
personally, and I will summarise any answers received, if anyone is
interested.
Phillipa Grimstone
Eton College Library
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