Actually Muse isn;t locked up quite that badly - it will turn ABC into tadpoles on the screen. What it won't do is play or print. Maybe I should make Muse2 so that it will *play* ABC for free. (It's a one-line change so I may be able to find the time). L.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Jack Campin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, July 23, 2002 11:01 PM Subject: [abcusers] ABC software in reference libraries I gave a copy of my CD-ROM to the National Library of Scotland. They said, great, can we have six of them please? This because they're part of the legal-deposit system in the UK, including others like the Mitchell, the Bodleian and the British Library. They also gave me the darnedest form, intended to deal with deposits of non-print media, which covered a whole lot of questions I hadn't thought about at all. Electronic media are not formally covered by legal deposit, it's all voluntary contributions; since the whole thing would have been impossible without the NLS's help, I certainly owe them this. One question they asked was what sort of access I'd prefer. There are three grades of access: single-user at a workstation, single-user over their internal network, and open access (any number of users, maybe offsite). They suggested the middle one: it means the CD stays in the stacks rather than in the none-too-gentle hands of J. Random User - probably means disks are loaded manually by librarians for the most part, though perhaps they have a carousel or permanent mounting for popular items. The harder one was hardware/software requirements. How long is a piece of string? You can read the text of the CD with Lynx. You can do that and also look at the scores with the HTML Viewer application on the Mac, which runs in 1 Mb of memory on System 7.1 (might even work on a Mac Plus, I'll check that). Probably on something similarly spartan for DOS or Unix. Listening to the MIDI or QuickTime files takes a good bit more computing power, but it's standard stuff; install IE 5 on any machine that will let you and you've got something that will basically work. Which leaves the ABC files. You don't *need* to look at those to make sense of the CD, but it helps, particularly as most of the bibliographic data and documentation of my editorial interventions is in them. So it would be nice to have ABC applications on the CD that could be run over the network. BarFly can almost do that (needs to sidestep that loopy pre-X MacOS practice of storing individuals' config data in the System Folder, which should be write-protected in any sensible public-space installation), but isn't ideal since there are few Macs in the NLS and none in easily accessible places. I don't know what machines the other legal-deposit libraries offer to the public, but Windows would seem to be a good bet. But note, I *can't* expect librarians to install and configure specialized software. I'm thinking of making a special reference library edition of the thing, with software included to do something meaningful with the ABC. The retail version won't do; it only has a locked-until-you-pay-up version of Muse on it which gives you no idea of ABC's potential. Would software implementors out there be prepared to let me have fully working versions of their programs to include on these six CDs, set up so they can run over a network off a CD and assuming no write permissions at all on client machines? The libraries guarantee that nobody gets to download anything, and printing can be limited to whatever I specify, so nobody's going to get pirated from this. For Unix, we have a can of worms because of the range of platforms out there - I don't think you can even expect Intel Linux binaries to work across two different releases because of hard-coded paths, and trying to make something multi-platform for all of Linux on Intel and PPC, FreeBSD on Alphas, Solaris on Sparcs, Darwin etc would be a nightmare. Perhaps only Java-based solutions like Skink make sense for that. No need for any PostScript generators, since nobody's going to be printing anything, and some other kinds of ABC application are equally irrelevant to this situation. I don't recall any precedent for people putting software in libraries under legal deposit. This is a kinda sneaky way of doing exactly that. Gotta be a first time. =================== <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> =================== To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
