The group is currently a closed one, not out of secrecy or isolationaism but just while we get used to running it, and anyone with an interest in Inmagic products is welcome to join.

At our AGM and Bright Ideas Day in December we heard from Phil Green, Chief Technology Officer at Inmagic, that SydneyPLUS had acquired Inmagic’s special library products as well as the Inmagic brand. The products acquired include Inmagic’s DB/Text Library Suite of products: DB/TextWorks, DB/Text WebPublisher Pro, and Inmagic Genie. Additionally, the companies are announcing a strategic partnership to co-market and support Inmagic’s Presto for Social Libraries.

Soutron’s UK supplier agreement with Inmagic terminated on 31 December 2011 and has not been renewed (no dealers of Inmagic have as yet had their agreement renewed for 2012). Graham Beastall, Managing Director of Soutron, told us that he had had no personal communication from anyone at Inmagic since last year shortly before the purchase of Inmagic.

Here is Graham Beastall’s prepared statement from Soutron Limited for Inmagic:

Soutron has a new fully integrated library and knowledge management system called “Soutron”.

It is designed around a very flexible database that takes advantage of the relational capabilities of Microsoft SQL Server and is capable of being used with any language or character set. Our vision is that software needs to be very simple to use and should do more to help users publish content. This is at the heart of our company with a librarian leading that development.

Our success in selling the system to organisations such as Fossil, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Royal Bank of Canada and City of Toronto Legal Services influenced our decision to open an office in the USA this month (February 8 2012). This builds on the successes that we have enjoyed with clients using it in the UK and Ireland, Belgoim, Italy and Switzerland across a range of sectors. There are many clients who have migrated from other systems such as Sirsi Dynix, Heritage, Inmagic, Penlib, EOSi, Filemaker, MS Access to take advantage of the new fully web based systems that we have created.

We continue to provide support and a complete range of services for all Inmagic users but in the months and years ahead we foresee selling Soutron solutions rather than Inmagic solutions.

This is a major change for Soutron, since we have been the sole UK and Ireland distributor for the past 21 years and the only one in Europe offering comprehensive Inmagic support across all product lines.

Our goal is to be highly responsive to customer needs. We believe strongly in the service and support of libraries and knowledge centres and we can best achieve that by offering clients a simple migration to a new system from Soutron, where we can respond directly to all and any needs of the library.

For those with an Inmagic software maintenance agreement, you will continue to be provided with new releases via Inmagic Canada Software direct as has been the case for many years and can continue as normal without any change. Support for your systems will continue to be provided by Soutron in the UK if you have a support agreement with us.

Organisations that have custom applications using DB Textworks and require specialist assistance may wish to discuss how best to develop systems for the future. If you feel that you would like to discuss your needs in detail we will be pleased to make arrangements to meet and address any concerns.

For any existing client using Soutron’s support services who wishes to migrate to Soutron’s application, Soutron Limited has an affordable and cost neutral offer that includes providing all data conversion and training, free of charge. Please contact Graham Beastall: graham.beastall@soutron.com.

The funding landscape is still rather bleak and budgets remain under pressure. Continuing our mission to support your resilience and exploit your current resources, we’re once again offering free admission to this year’s Bright Ideas Day and UKIUG AGM.

Our revamped programme last year was popular and so we’ll continue with shorter sessions, more speakers, greater interaction and networking opportunities all to spark more of your bright ideas.

The day is free for both UKIUG members and non-members to attend: please complete the booking form and return to us to book your attendance. Don’t miss this opportunity to meet other Inmagic users and gain ideas from our excellent speakers.

Programme

9:30 Registration & tea/coffee

10:00 Welcome & UK Inmagic User Group AGM

10:30 Short speaker session:Emily Heath (Energy Institute) – “Building websites with WordPress”

10:45 – 11:15 tea/coffee

11.15 Group discussions

11:45 Norman Briggs (P & C Intelligence) –
“Using DB/TextWorks to run a Boat Hire business”

12:15 Sue Jaiteh (Soutron Ltd) –
“Enabling query logging for Webpublisher and Textworks”

13:00 buffet lunch

14:00 Phillip Green (Inmagic Inc) -
An update on new developments, news and Q&A session

15:00 Graham Beastall (Soutron Ltd)

15.30 Group discussion on the future of the UK Inmagic User Group

16:00 tea/coffee and a chance to catch up with fellow InMagic users

The programme is subject to change and unforeseen cancellation

We are working hard to finalise this year’s speaker programme. Presentations from the 2010 Bright Ideas Day are now available to UKIUG members by logging into our Members only section – contact the Website Editor if you are a member and need a password. For 2011 we’re offering free, no-strings attached membership of the UKIUG user group – so there’s never been a better time to join!

“A summary / consensus of useful enhancements as output from the meeting would be great”

To help get the ideas flowing we also asked people to think about what they liked and disliked most about their InMagic products.

The results of 30 minutes of lively discussion in small groups were fed back to the whole group later in the morning.  It was here we discovered from other attendees that we could already actually do one or two things on our wishlists but just didn’t realise it!  The flip charts were then stuck to the walls around the room so that we could add any further thoughts as they came to us during the day, and these were summarised and e-mailed to Phil immediately after the event.

The UKIUG top wish list items were:

• Automated backups for CS/Textworks
• The ability to write a report as .doc format
• An ‘Undo’ option for batch modifying/deleting
• An easy scripting options/facility
• More functionality in web forms – variation of font etc in one box
• The ability to paste into a field and keep formatting, e.g. bold and italics
• Can’t backup or unlock a record when someone in
• It would be nice to be able to have different formatting in same field or box instead of all bold or all italics

The thing we disliked most was in Genie – when items are returned from loan, the title and name of borrower are not displayed.

What we liked most, probably not a surprise to the group, was the control we have over the product.  We can be more or less self sufficient and rarely need to rely on our IT departments.

So, have a look at future enhancements to InMagic products and we may well find some of our UKIUG requests are included.

Thanks to UKIUG Committee Member Shaulan Chanlewis for the photos.

The Poetry Library is a fascinating place and unusual in that it is a specialist subject library yet also a public lending library. A diverse user group of poets, critics, students and poetry fans use the library. Four books can be borrowed for a month at a time.

It is extremely popular, receiving phone/e-mail enquiries from around the world, many of which are people searching for lost quotations. Only 3 or 4 others like it exist and it is probably the biggest poetry library in the world.

As well as books, 172 poetry magazines are available to read, of which a few issues a year, containing a mixture of old and new poems, are picked to digitise using OCR technology. It is a time consuming process as permission must be sought from each poet or their estate. Digitisation has the big advantage of making each poem fully text searchable, so people searching for poetry quotes online can come across the Poetry Library site that way.

Indexing magazines is also a particular challenge for the library due to time constraint, so less than a handful of their magazines are indexed. They copy and collect together reviews about particular poets in files. They don’t worry about collecting poet biographies as they are large (taking up a lot of space) and tend to be provided by public libraries.

We learnt more about the various ways the Poetry Library uses Inmagic Genie and were given an excellent demonstration of cataloguing in Genie by UKIUG member Lorraine Mariner.