Greetings--

[rtha@loc.gov]

Hi,

   My name is Dick Thaxter and I work in the Motion Picture, Broadcasting,
and Recorded Sound Division of the Library of Congress.  I've done lots of
programming over the years (as a cataloger, as a manager, and most
recently as an automation specialist).    I've never found a group or listserv
where sharing home-grown library software was a primary interest but I'm
hoping that this will be the place.  In fact, one of the reasons I jumped at the
chance to join was that I was about to ask on SYSLIB if anyone had a
handy USMARC character set to Latin-1 conversion program in Visual
Basic--otherwise I'll have to write one in the next week or so.  SYSLIB-L has
never focused on coding issues or sharing software--mostly system
adminstration stuff.  So is there a handy function already coded?

   For several years now my colleagues and I have been writing extensions to
our local systems.  The most notable of those efforts have been Electronic
CIP, TCEC, ClipSearch, MUMS Little Helper and other systems which are
written for OS/2 in VX-REXX and use HLLAPI to communicate with our
mainframe applications via our custom 3270 emulator.  My
partner-in-crime, David Williamson has written up some of these systems in
various articles.  We now need to port much of this functionality to the
off-the-shelf ILS, Voyager, which LC is installing this year.  David and
I work outside of our IS department and both started doing this kind of work
as catalogers, not programmers.  Our "real" IS shop did not write one line of
code using this HLLAPI interface to MUMS during the whole life span of this
OS/2 emulator (1991? to present).

  I've avoided W95 and VB, but now we're doing the crash course and it
turns out that VB6 is actually pretty decent considering its origins.  We've
been given a jump start in our efforts through the generosity of Gary Strawn
at Northwestern who has written a full-featured OCX to read Authority, Bib,
Holdings, and Item records from Voyager.  I believe Gary offered this to
other programmers in the Voyager-L list.

  Since I also work with M/B/RS's web site and with our National Digital
Library offerings of moving images and sound recordings that's another
whole area of interest.

  Let's follow Daniel's lead and make this list productive!

Dick Thaxter

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*Richard Thaxter             rtha@loc.gov               *
*Automation Specialist                                  *
*Motion Picture, Broadcasting, Recorded Sound Division  *
*Library of Congress                                    *
*Standard disclaimers apply                             *
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