I don't have any experience with Access, so I'm not sure what its
capabilities are. We are about to use it to develop a new subscription
management system, to replace our old one on Dataease for DOS, so no
doubt I shall be learning pretty quickly what it can do. I would agree
that Access is probably the logical choice for a generally available
database, as it appears to be so widely used.
However, reading Malcolm Shifrin's e-mail, I wondered whether he might
find a program called Idealist useful. Originally developed by
Blackwell's, it was used by the Bristol Historical Database project
because of its flexibility and ability to store text in fields which can
'grow' automatically. Originally, we used version 5 to develop new
databases for our book and periodical reviews (a number of different
record definitions can be used in the same database), our Local History
Directory database and our courses database. Indexing and searching are
good and exporting information to text files has been wonderfully easy.
The information on our website under societies (http://www.local-
history.co.uk/Groups/index.html) and courses (http://www.local-
history.co.uk/courses/index.html) was extracted from the Idealist
databases, although we had to insert the html code manually into the
text.
We have abandoned version 5 in despair because it was so 'buggy', but we
have reverted to version 3 and found that very stable. We are hoping
that version 2000, available (so we have been told) early next year,
will fix most of the bugs in version 5 and will have the facility for
downloading to the web. If anyone would like to see it for themselves,
then you could contact its developers Bekon on 0161 476 1300, e-mail
[log in to unmask] - they provided us with a not-very-illuminating demo
disk, but it does give some idea of its capabilities.
--
Susan Griffiths
The Local History Press
3 Devonshire Promenade
Lenton
Nottingham
NG7 2DS
Tel: 0115 9706473
Fax: 0115 9424857
web site: www.local-history.co.uk
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