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The computer software package CDS/ISIS is suitable for the storage and retrieval of structured, text‐oriented information, such as bibliographic descriptions. Versions exist for various hardware including IBM microcomputers and compatibles. The software is very attractive, mainly because it is powerful and because the producer, Unesco, normally fulfils requests to use it for free. Micro CDS/ISIS is reviewed in this paper which includes recent experience with Version 2.3.

Although there are many articles on CDS/ISIS which describe projects in which conversion techniques are used, there is very little literature about the conversion programs themselves.This paper provides an overview of the conversion process and gives brief descriptions of some of the available programs.

A dynamic approach to making legacy databases, like CDS/ISIS, interoperable with OAI‐compliant digital libraries (DLs).

There are many bibliographic databases that are being maintained using legacy database systems. CDS/ISIS is one such legacy database system. It was designed and developed specifically for handling textual data. Over the years, many databases have been developed using this package. There is, however, no mechanism supported by the package for seamless interoperability of databases. The open archives initiative (OAI) addresses the issue of interoperability by using a framework to facilitate the discovery of content stored in distributed archives or bibliographic databases through the use of the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI‐PMH). The protocol is becoming a de facto standard for interoperability of DLs. Many of the legacy database systems that are in use today, to the best of our knowledge, for various reasons, are not OAI‐compliant. This makes it difficult for the legacy databases to share their metadata automatically. There are two possible approaches to make legacy databases OAI‐compliant – static and dynamic. In this paper, we discuss the dynamic approach to make CDS/ISIS databases OAI‐compliant.

The dynamic approach is a simple way to make legacy databases OAI‐compliant so that they become interoperable with other OAI‐compliant DLs.

Developing a general‐purpose tool to make legacy databases OAI‐compliant may be difficult as the driver software needed for database connectivity may not be easily available. Also, the structure of the databases are likely be so varied that identifying the fields that make up the databases programmatically will be very challenging.

Provides a dynamic approach to making legacy databases interoperable with OAI‐compliant libraries.

Micro CDS/ISIS is a software package distributed by Unesco to non‐profit making organisations, free of charge. It is suitable for handling non‐numeric, variable length, textual information. This article studies the search interface of version 2.3 of the software in relation to user friendliness, user instructions, output control and documentation, in an evaluative manner with the objective of finding out whether Micro CDS/ISIS comfortably accommodates all kinds of users — novices, intermediates and the experienced. At the end, considering each and every aspect evaluated, it is concluded that Micro CDS/ ISIS is suitable more for experienced and intermediate users than for novices.

A comparison was made between CDS/ISIS, its Windows version WINISIS, and InMagic’s INMAGIC and DB/TextWorks software. Packages were evaluated for their database creation, information retrieval and report production capabilities. Windows versions were found to provide significant enhancements over DOS versions of software. The evaluation aimed to determine the advantages to a developing country of creating bibliographic databases using commercial software.

The main purpose of this paper is to present the work recently carried out by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in collaboration with Associazione per la documentazione le biblioteche e gli archivi (DBA) in Italy to make web CDS/ISIS‐based applications compliant with the OAI‐PMH. CDS/ISIS is an Integrated Storage and Information Retrieval System of Unesco, which is widely used especially in Latin America and Africa. There are hundreds of CDS/ISIS‐based application systems managing bibliographical reference, ensuring high quality content through the use of built‐in authority files, data entry guidelines and validations. It also allows for metadata export in many different formats.

The methodology adopted included study, analysis and evaluation of three existing solutions for exposing metadata from the CDS/ISIS database repositories to the OAI framework.

The implementation did not include the development of automatic procedures for incremental harvesting from CDS/ISIS databases nor the normalization of the harvested data. However, a lot of experience in implementation of OAI was gained which will be useful for future development of non‐CDS/ISIS systems.

The research and development work demonstrates the importance and implications of this work for the whole CDS/ISIS community and specifically for the participating centres from the AGRIS network.

It proposes an open source, easily parametrizable plug‐in tool, which can be adapted to expose metadata from a general structure CDS/ISIS database using the OAI‐PMH protocol. This work assures that semantically rich metadata for agricultural science and research publications based on the “AGRIS Application Profile” can be handled by the OAI protocol. This in turn allows for further creation of additional services based on the exchange of knowledge on agricultural science and technology publications world‐wide.

Several microcomputer‐based software packages are available which support library operations and the creation and searching of bibliographic databases. dBase/foxBase are such packages which are widely used in library operations, but these packages are limited in scope. Some of the important features such as variable field length, variable record length, full boolean search capability, flexible indexing and special print formatting are not available.

A library automation software package (SANJAY) has been developed in the CDS/ISIS V2.3 environment extensively using the Pascal interface to meet the requirements of a model library. Using SANJAY a user can get instant access to information, responses to queries and reports from multiple databases. It is an interactive, menu driven, and user‐friendly package which carries out routine functions of a library. The software is capable of inter‐relating two or more databases for a single application like acquisition or circulation. This paper identifies some of the problems in the CDS/ISIS V2.3 package and presents the features of the SANJAY package that overcome these problems and discusses its implementation in a government library.

The CDS/ISIS software for textual data management, distributed by Unesco and now gaining popularity in the Third World and non‐profit organisations, proves to combine enough power and flexibility to serve as a development environment for a public access database of community information full‐text records. This article describes how CDS/ ISIS has been used and adapted to this end and discusses some features of the GIDS‐system, in which a public access interface and an electronic logbook for research on the system's use are most central.

Describes the use of the CDS/ISIS bibliographic database package within the Tata Energy Research Institute Library in Delhi. Indicates the capabilities of the package and states the hardware requirements and package availability (from UNESCO). Assesses the applications of the package through a comprehensive survey of the literature on its use within libraries throughout the world.