From: tony@wehi.edu.au
Newsgroups: aus.aarnet
Subject: Re: ABN Medline gateway available to public ???
Date: 21 Jul 92 02:43:50 GMT
Organization: Walter & Eliza Hall Institute


	We have been following this ABN/Medline debate with interest. All those
wishing for an AARNet service are, I am sure, well intentioned, but what SERVICE
do you all have in mind. It is all very well to have the Medline data, but 
you need some software to access it.

	We here at WEHI have been a beneficiary of the NHMRC funding of access
to the Dept of Health system for many years. This system (ie software) runs
on an IBM MVS cruncher - how many of you have one of these dinosaurs available
to run a national service? And one of the reasons (as I understand it) that it
is closing down is that the CD data service now available gets the data updates
out in a more timely fashion than the Dept of Health got tapes of updates 
from the US. So what is the point of setting up a national server based on this
type of system???

	Now we come to the replacement CD distribution service. I have got news
for you! The private companies that are handling this type of distribution
freak out when you mention networking - it seems to me that these companies did
these business plans along these lines when they bid for the contract:

		x number of scientists in the world
		sell nearly x scientists each a subscription
		hopefully sell as close to x scientists a CD drive
		and hopefully a few PCs to boot!
		= a tidy profit!

(You should see a "technical" paper that they are circulating supposedly
explaining why it is technically impossible to mount a networked service!)

	We have been trying to set up an effective network of the CD service 
just in our building. And has it been a trying experience! We are at the 
stage that we have a tower of 6 CD drives on a Quadra Mac serving a network
of about fifty Macintoshes. The company that we are dealing with seemed
uncomfortable with this arrangement, but eventually we got a 8 concurrent user 
licence for their software and we strictly enforce it. But the software is not
network aware. It only allows searching of one CD at a time. You cannot mount
multile years simultaneously to do a search. Hence each search has to be 
multiple times for multiple years. We would like to put more CDs in the tower
(it has physical space for 14 and we would like to put in more years, 
Current Contents, EMBL, GenBank, Entrez DNA data etc), but it would appear no
one yet makes a NuBus card for the Quadra that will take CDs! (Yes I know
that we could copy to hard disc, and that's what we might have to do).
Also the next Mac version will be network aware, but that worries me when
you understand the PC story below.

	Now we have some PCs as well in the building. We just thought that 
they could run AppleShare for PC to make the CDs available for them, and buy 
the appropriate software for the PC. But no! Their software for the PC has a 
hook in it that tests for the CD being on the local machine and it will not 
co-operate with networked CDs. I believe that they have a version of the 
software that will work for CDs mounted on a Novell network, but that is a 
special deal for special customers that satisfy certain standards on usage
counts, licence monitoring, security etc. We do not have a Novell network,
so our PC users have no access. We are in the ridiculous situation we we are 
willing to hand money over to a company for mutiple copies of their software
to run on PC's if they will remove the hook, but they are refusing us - they
want us to install a second tower on the PCs and  a Novell network!

	And all of you who are thinking of writing your own access software for
the CDs, be aware that there is a claim of copyright on the encoded indexed
files etc. You would be up for a fair bit of reverse engineering as well.

	So a national service might seem a nice idea, but what would it entail? 
Financing direct telnet logins to the NLM seems to only possiblity, unless
these private companies come to their senses, or NLM forces a change of contract
or someone wants to take them to court - surely these artifical restraints
on networking must be a restraint of trade or something.

			Regards Tony Kyne, WEHI