SinoCat

Purpose of the application

SinoCat is a library technical services tool which is the first cumulated edition of the Chinese National Bibliography on CD-ROM. The cataloging database comprises 200,000 Chinese records from the National Central Library, Taiwan, ROC.

Distribution category

SinoCat is a commercial product which is now marketed in Taiwan.

Availability

The source code is not available and is copyright.

Description of application

You use SinoCat to locate books or articles by selecting one of the available options such as general search (search by keyword), boolean search (full text searching with boolean operators), browse, etc. Once the reference is found, it shows a cataloging screen with title, author, description, ISBN, location, etc.

It supports retrospective conversion effectively and downloads into the local system in ISO-2709 structure. The application also performs original cataloging, supports printed catalogue cards, processing labels and various kinds of reports.

It also provides a lot of important information on-line (context-sensitive help) like Chinese MARC, cataloging rules, etc.

Developmental problems

Conflict with the Chinese System. Although this is not the main point, source code of TV 1.03 was modified to allow it to work well with the Chinese System.

TListBox. The programmer wanted to list over 64k of items on the screen due to large amount of database in CD-ROM, but could not do so. Finally, he inherited a class from TListBox to read a certain number of items at a time and read others when necessary.

Size of executable. SinoCat is a huge application which does a lot of things for librarians. Its size is over 640k and relies on the overlay provided by Borland. The author tried to use Blinker 3.0 which indicated that it could load the program to protected mode without modifying source code, but it failed.

Size of DGROUP. Because there is a lot of data structures and variables in this application, the size of DATA_SEG is over 64k. Using objxref.exe provided by Borland, the author inspected the size of each function which he modified by declaring auto variables or arrays to be global, using modifier 'far' to force variables to be far and the like - in order to minimize the size of DATA_SEG.

Context-sensitive help. The programmer used TVHC to make context-sensitive help for the application. The problem was that the help could not tab backward through the help screens which he overcame by simply defining a keyword pointing to the previous help screen.

Reason for choosing Turbo Vision

First of all, this application was developed in DOS because it was the common platform (DOS + Chinese System) for the library in Taiwan at that time. This is the main reason. Secondly, TV provides context-sensitive help which is used widely in the application. Thirdly, TV provides a very impressive user interface. Last, TV is, in the opinion of Wee-San Lee, very similar to OWL 1.0 and should not be difficult to port applications from TV to OWL 1.0.

The application was written using TV1.03.

Contact

Wee-San Lee formerly of FlySheet Information Inc. (Taiwan) <wlee@chaph.usc.edu>

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