Good Morning List!
We retired our PCAcquisitions database when we migrated to Voyager about 6
years ago. Last summer I was given a new PC, and getting PCAcquisitions to
run for lookup purposes required more kludging than it once did. I am
interested in preserving these data and their accessibility more or less in
perpetuity -- at minimum, I would like them to be *movable* into a different
format. It still runs, luckily, but it's a DOS-based program that runs in a
DOS-emulator, and every time I move it I have to edit config.sys and
autoexec.bat. I don't believe that this will be possible forever.
My question is this. Does anyone out there have a legally-sharable copy of
the uncompiled code for the application?
Keeping these data accessible is not simply a matter of maintaining the
table structure, links and indexes. Much of the system's functionality
(calculations, translation from undocumented codes into English words for
display, etc.) is in the programming that runs the application, and which we
have only in compiled form -- that is, the code runs the software just fine,
but is not readable by humans.
We retain all acquisitions history for the materials in our collections, and
the data in this little database represent about 15 years of activity which
we would prefer not to lose. It hasn't even been ten years since we stopped
using the program.
Thank you All~
Best,
Mary
--
Mary O'Dea
Acquisitions Librarian
The Newberry Library
60 W Walton
Chicago IL 60610
address off-list: odeam_at_newberry.org
tel: 312-255-3559
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Received on Sun Mar 01 2009 - 11:07:27 EST