At 10:18 AM 10/6/97 EST, Brad Coon wrote:
>We are a small academic library with less then 2000 total
>subscriptions.  We have for some time been conducting
>an annual Serials Review which is manipulated through
>DBase IV.  We produce reports showing cost, price increase
>over last year, department, audience and if behind schedule
>why.  It is very buggy, very labor intensive, and rapidly
>becoming very obsolete.  Does anyone have any suggestions
>for a prepackaged program or experience with converting
>older DOS based Dbase programs to something Windows based,

My assistant maintains a similar "database" in Microsoft's EXCEL.  Among
other things, we track up to 3 department codes, bind/MF/toss status, and 5
years of pricing.  We used to maintain pricing for only the current year but
kept getting requests for back information.  If a title is cancelled, we now
put CANCEL in the price column rather than deleting it the next fiscal year.
My assistant makes a yearly backup so that the older data is (hopefully!)
always available if we need to go further back than 5 years. There are close
to 2000 titles in the spreadsheet as it now includes cancelled and previous
titles.  While some of the info is available from our vendor, having it in
this format allows us to manipulate it easily.

I would actually like to move it to Microsoft's ACCESS but am just starting
to learn ACCESS.  We continue to add columns and it is getting unwieldy in
EXCEL.

I should warn you that to manipulate a spreadsheet this size you need a good
computer, at least a Pentium 100.  My old 486 would run the spreadsheet but
sorting it definitely took longer than on my assistant's P100.  ACCESS also
requires a high-end computer.

We were running Windows3.1 and Office 95.  We just upgraded computers
(preparation for Voyager) and are now running Windows95 (great multi-tasking
IF you have the RAM!) and Office97.

I hope this helps.
Nancy S. Hanks
Serials Librarian               Phone:  (412) 738-2658
Bailey Library                  Fax:    (412) 738-2661
Slippery Rock University        Email:  nancy.hanks@sru.edu
Slippery Rock, PA  16057