INTERESTING PRODUCTS (TO ME)

Library Administrator's Digest, Feb 2005 by Robinson, Charles W

Last week I returned from a week in Boston attending the midwinter meeting of ALA. I took the train from Baltimore to Boston Back Bay, a very comfortable way to travel, without all the hassle of air travel these days. And at five-plus hours on the Acela Express, probably not much slower than by air. And in this particular case, a lot faster, because fog on the East Coast had fouled air travel to a faretheewell. I talked to people who were hours late into Boston, either because of fog there or fog at their originating airport. As a matter of fact, I didn't see much from the train either because of the fog all the way up. On the trip back, however, it was pretty clear though cold (six degrees leaving Boston, and the Back Bay station isn't heated!), and I saw quite a bit of Long Island Sound.

I spent a good deal of time in the exhibits, always interesting to me. They were on two floors, hundreds of booths. The second floor was pretty much filled with enormous exhibits of the biggies, like Ebsco, OCLC and a dozen or so companies trying to get your integrated library system business.

But around the edges of the exhibit floor there were dozens of companies in the small booths unencumbered with myriad sales personnel and/or customers. They had time to talk about the product they were trying to sell to this tiny little industry, libraries. And generally the person in the booth was a biggie in the company.

Disc Repair

Well, we all know that music CDs, CD books, and DVDs have created a lot of use in public libraries in the past several years. As a matter of fact, I have sometimes won-, dered if they haven't amounted to all the increase in items circulated in libraries recently. They certainly have created a need for all sorts of supporting equipment, like racks and various security systems, since they are so easy to steal and so much in demand.

And, is there a problem with damaged discs? I haven't read anything about it, but apparently there is. The first small booth I stopped in was pushing the "VMI3500 Buffmgunit" or "Buffer Unit" (they spell it both ways in their brochure). They describe the gleaming silver machine as an "Effective Repair and Maintenance Solution for Discs." The machine can clean or repair up to 70 discs per hour, with a bunch of whirling polishing wheels. It costs $3500, plus supplies, of course, like the polishing gunk you put on the disc.

The question is, do you have a lot of damaged discs? If so, it is probably pretty economical to repair them, especially if the machine is operated by a volunteer. It's made by VenMill Industries (in the U.S.!). Their Web site is www.Venmill.com. Wandering on, I came across yet another vendor selling disc repair equipment, so there really must be a demand out there for these machines. This company (Disc-Go-Tech of British Columbia, www.discgotech.com) had three machines on display, small, medium and large. The big one ($2495) says in its brochure, "With its variable time control, it can polish a disc in as little as 30 seconds or remove deep scratches in less than five minutes, all in one simple step." Not shown was an even bigger model, the DGlOO, at $4995, which won't be introduced until May 2005, "perfect for high-volume store level operations, library systems, and disc repair professionals looking for high quality disc repair." At that price, pretty big library systems, I guess.

But hold on! The company also has a "Disc-Go-Pod," about 8 inches square, for $395! This was described by the sales guy as manual, because you had to twist two knobs on the top. For $495, a similar machine with no knobs. He handed me a disc and his pocket knife and said, "Scratch it." So I did, fairly deeply, I thought. I asked if that damaged the pits made by a laser, and he said no, they were too deep. I put the thing in the $495 Disc-Go-Pod Plus, let it run for five minutes and looked at the disc. Scratch was still there. Well, he said, it would probably take another five minutes. I took his word for it. Who knows, this cheap machine (made in China) might just do if you don't have a big problem.

Disc Storage

Wandering on in pursuit of interesting new stuff, I came upon the booth of an outfit called Library Automation Technologies, of Somerdale, NJ (www.LATcorp.com). They had two items, including something called Flashscan, a selfcheckout system which I didn't discuss with them. Hey, it may or may not be better or cheaper than all the others on the market. Probably certainly cheaper than the 3M pirates charge.

Also in the booth was this huge ugly box (well, they said it was a prototype) called the "The Intelligent Media Manager." It's about 3 feet by 3 feet, and waist high.

Here's how it works: you load the machine with up to 1,500 "raw" discs (discs out of their packages). Presumably there's a rack nearby with the empty cases, each with a bar-encoded sticker. A patron holds a library card up to a slot in the big box and then holds each CD or DVD wanted up to the slot so the label can be read. As each label is read, the "raw" CD or DVD slides out the hole. The patron then puts the discs in the proper boxes and trundles off. Returns work the same way, but in reverse. The theory is that if you have, say, 5,000 discs, only 1,500 are going to be in at any given time, so the capacity of the big box will be adequate.