Paul,

I believe you will find that FileMaker Pro can accomplish all of these
tasks including the relational ones and has the advantage of being much
easier to use.

Jim Craig
James D. Craig
Archivist
The Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada
[log in to unmask]
905-542-7400


> ----------
> From:         Paul Henry
> Reply To:     A forum for discussion for the Archives Assoc. of
> Ontario
> Sent:         Thursday, May 24, 2001 11:33 PM
> To:   [log in to unmask]
> Subject:      Re: new address
>
> At 15:01 2001-05-24 -0400, you wrote:
> >I have been looking at Inmagic for archive software. Our school
> supports
> >Microsoft Access and the  head of our IT department believes that we
> should
> >use it.
>
> Here's a quick comparison between the two:
> http://www.tdm.com.au/compare.htm
>
> While the seemingly trite "because it's Microsoft" may work for some,
> you'll note that DB/Textworks (Inmagic) has features better suited to
> archival tasks, such as:
>
> Indexing and browsing by field
> Boolean searching
> Stop words and other sorting functions
> Indexing modes, logging, and reporting
>
> And most importantly:
> Unlimited field lengths, all fully indexed by term and keyword.
>
> The DOS version is free. The Windows version is available under
> various
> licensing arrangements.
>
> The only serious bugaboo in Inmagic (also not available in Access
> without
> some programming) is the lack of recursively relational linking. By
> this I
> mean the ability to store multi-level descriptions (fonds, series,
> file,
> item) in the same database file and automagically display them
> hierarchically in reports. For that, you need GenCat (Eloquent
> Systems).
> GenCat has its own problems, but I used it successfully at the
> National
> Archives for a number of years.
>
> I hope this helps you convince your IT department to let you use
> Inmagic.
>
> Good luck.
>
> Paul
>