Alerts

Viewbooks In NLW for June, 1987 I drew attention to “Viewbooks” because I felt the idea had considerable potential for use in libraries. They are books on single floppy disks of length up to 40,000 words and, because of having a standard format and very obvious single‐key operating controls, can be “read”, after little or no instruction, on RM Nimbus, BBC, Amstrad or IBM‐compatible personal computers. The pages are 18 lines in length and it is possible to move to any page, forwards or backwards, retrace one's steps, select from index terms, cross‐references or contents lists and, even more usefully, search for words or parts of words throughout the entire text. Extra copies of the disk can easily be made and pages or part pages be transferred to another disk for word processing or be printed out in hard copy. A further option is that up to three lines of jottings or personal notes can be made for each page, these being stored at the end of the main text and also being printable.