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