Re: Working with Innopac after Passport/CATMe end of life

["Guajardo, Richard R." <guajardo at uh dot edu>]

INNOPAC Digest, Vol 15, Issue 41We also learned yesterday that telnet support is no longer in the plan for the Connexion client. We rely on the use of OML scripting for spine label production from our Innopac catalog.  For now, it appears that CatME will live on as a telnet client here as well.

..........................................................
Richard Guajardo
Head, Cataloging & Electronic Access
University of Houston
114 University Libraries
Houston, TX 77204-2000
713/743-9984
guajardo at uh dot edu

  ----- Original Message -----  

  Message: 13 
  Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2005 09:22:12 -0800 
  From: "Reese, Terry" <terry dot reese at oregonstate dot edu> 
  Subject: Working with Innopac after Passport/CATMe end of life 
  To: <INNOPAC at innopacusers dot org> 
  Message-ID: 
          <5B7F6F34471D3D42851392808677CA1401E9C82F at mtadams dot nws dot oregonstate dot edu> 
  Content-Type: text/plain;charset="US-ASCII" 

  Howdy folks, 

  I was talking with David Whitehair, OCLC's Connexion Client product 
  manager late last week, and was told that Connexion client will not 
  include a telnet client like Passport or CATMe as originally planned in 
  version 1.4.  In fact, OCLC has no foreseeable plans of ever adding a 
  telnet client to Connexion.  David said that the assumption was that far 
  too few users make use of this functionality to justify the cost of 
  adding it to the client.  In his words (3/18): 
          >>Yes, unfortunately, we just made this decision.  Our 
  investigation determined that it will be a 
          >>lot more work than previously expected to migrate this 
  functionality to Connexion, so 
          >> we won't be able to move it [the telnet]. 
  Apparently, I was one of the few vocal supporters of adding this 
  functionality simply because we automate a good deal of interaction 
  between our own local catalog and OCLC -- something that will no longer 
  be possible.  I'm having a difficult time believing that OSU will be the 
  only institution affected -- particularly since Innopac institutions 
  have a telnet interface available to them and it is so easy to script 
  to, but maybe I'm wrong.  

  In our case, I'm certain that we will be able to work around the absence 
  with hopefully a minimal amount of disruption, but where this is going 
  to really hurt is when handling conditional, repetitive tasks (something 
  Millennium's "macro" language can't handle), doing recon/db maintenance 
  within the system or committing conditional actions on lists of records 
  of all types.  And while I know that it might pain OCLC to hear it, this 
  means that CATMe will get a reprieve here at OSU.  While we will not be 
  able to work with OCLC via CATMe after the cutoff date, the telnet 
  client will continue to function just fine for our catalog until we 
  decide what we want to do long-term. 

  Anyway, I'm not sure when OCLC is planning on making this knowledge 
  available to the general public (maybe they have or maybe they will 
  after 1.3 is released) -- but  since I know that there are some very 
  talented technical services folks here on the list that this will 
  affect, I'm passing the information along (plus, I did ask permission, 
  though admittedly, not from David). 

  --Terry 

  ************************************************************************  
  Terry Reese                   
  Oregon State University Libraries 
  Cataloger for Networked Resources 
  Digital Production Unit Head 
  Oregon State University 
  Corvallis, Or  97331             
  Phone: 541-737-6384 
  Fax: 541-737-8267 
  terry dot reese at oregonstate dot edu 
  http://oregonstate.edu/~reeset/ 
  ************************************************************************  


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