8.0091 Summary on Search Engines for TLG (1/64)

Elaine Brennan (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Fri, 1 Jul 1994 12:24:39 EDT

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 8, No. 0091. Friday, 1 Jul 1994.

Date: Tue, 28 Jun 1994 15:46:43 -0500 (CDT)
From: anixon@carleton.edu (Andrea Nixon)
Subject: Search Engines for TLG and PHI data -- Summary

Thanks to all that responded to my query earlier this month on search
engines for the TLG and PHI data! The question I posted was:

>I am in the market for a search engine for use with the TLG and PHI (TLL)
>data on CD-ROM. Any platform will do. Does anyone know of a review of the
>various products available? What have your experiences been with these
>search engines? Which do you prefer?

To date there have been five responses. Of the 5, all are using Pandora on
the Mac platform. The results were mixed on the Intel/DOS side of things.
Products mentioned explicitly were: Musaios and TLG/PHI Workplace.

Pointers to further information included:

TLG Literature (paper)
Ian Lancashire's Humanities Computing Yearbook 1989-90 (paper)
ccat.sas.upenn.edu (gopher) Electronic Publications and Resources -> The
Thesaurus Linguae Graecae

The text of the responses are as follows.

1. If IBM/DOS, you have several options including some that can be
explored on the internet (e.g. John Baima, Randall Smith). If Mac, the
most popular option is PANDORA, and you can learn more also on the net.
For basic information, consult the TLG literature or Ian Lancashire's
Humanities Computing Yearbook 1989-90 (Oxford, 1991).

2. I use Pandora (Hypercard-based for the Mac) with the PHI Latin disk and
I've been happy with it. It lets you construct flexible searches and
it seems very stable. It seems to take a long time to load, but that may
have more to do with Hypercard than anything else.

3. Oxford has just installed pandora on a mac and musaios and TLG /PHI
Workplace on a pc (running off the hard disk, not the CDRom, for speed). Both
Pandora and the workplace products are good: I'm a pc person, so prefer the
latter, but there is nothing wrong with pandora (though you need a
wordprocessor to print decently). Musaios I am a bit nervous of - I think it is
still buggy.

4. I use Pandora 2.5 on a Macintosh. Since this is a Hypercard stack,
it operates rather slowly. Perhaps if and when a new "native" version of
Hypercard is released for the Apple PowerPCs, we will see a marked
improvement. Until then, I would appreciate hearing about other scholars'
experiences.

5. If you gopher to ccat.sas.upenn.edu and go to the right place on
the menu (I think it's electronic journals and resources), y ou can get to
the TLG's own gopher, where there is a rundown of most of the software
available for DOS and Mac platforms, quite helpful. We use Pandora here,
latest form (costs
an indiv. $50 I think $150 for a site license), on the Macs in the Keck
lab, where the CD drives are affiliated with Macs anyhow; and it does fine.
(PHI is harder to work with, but possible too: having been designed for
Ibycus)

I hope that others on the list find this information of help also.

Andrea Nixon
Academic Computing Coordinator - Humanities and Languages
Carleton College

anixon@carleton.edu