With Annales to the University of Koper?

In writing this review, I have at least two good reasons for goodwill. The first is of an objective nature, and the second is completely subjective. The objective reason is that with the CD-ROM edition of the Slovenian Bibliography I got a really good product, and the subjective reason is somewhat bordering on being malicious and concerns mainly the chief editor of this magazine, which I intend to thicken this time.

Mr. Editor is a cunning man – whenever he gets something to review that is great at first glance and worthy of all praise, he decides to give it to me. He believes that “this grumpy man” will find something to stumble over and make an elephant out of a fly. What inclinations guide him in this? I don’t know yet. But I know he’s not evil at all by nature, so I can assume some more noble motivation in the background. He probably doesn’t want readers to get the impression that they are just a provincial magazine that uncritically praises everything they do while browsing through the euphoric hymns themselves.

Despite risking a drop in the magazine’s overall reputation and my proverbial grumpiness, this time I have to admit that I failed to find anything I could point my finger at and write that it has to be corrected in a future issue. Except for two issues, which are completely negligible. And yet for the first of these two, one might perhaps say that it does not belong among the issues, but among the things to be commended. It concerns the use of the abbreviation CD-ROM, which lately everyone has been trying to make a Slovenian word for in the most “lucky” way possible. After various words I expected that in the National and University Library, where a number of experts in the Slovene language are gathered, someone would come up with an appropriate and not overly funny Slovene word for the CD-ROM. But they didn’t bother with that at all, and instead of a new word, they used the original CD-ROM abbreviation, which is understandable to everyone. As soon as I thought that with this I also got rid of all the embarrassments in the further use of this abbreviation (because if it is good enough for NUK, then it will be for me too), the fact that in the manual as a link between CD and ROM a hyphen and a dash appear alternately. I also noticed a similar inconsistency in declension, where a dash and a hyphen also appear alternately between the base and the added suffix.

The CD-ROM edition of the Slovenian bibliography contains monographic publications that were published between the years 1989 and 1994, and also those that are somewhat older, but were acquired by the library in the mentioned period. The Slovene national bibliography is based on the ethnic principle and includes books that meet at least one of three conditions: that it was written by a Slovene author, that it was published in the Slovene language or that it was published by a Slovene publishing house. Most of the information found on the CD-ROM has already been published, as the National and University Library has been preparing and regularly publishing the Slovenian bibliography of books in printed form on a quarterly basis since 1989. Of course, this time we are facing an unreasonably large amount of data, compared to the amount that is transmitted by the regular quarterly print editions. That is why the authors had to pay special attention to finding the data. And I have to say that they did their job very well. Instead of an unclear mass of data, the user encounters a sufficiently nice interface that allows for different ways of browsing the data.

When designing the graphical interface, we should also mention the packaging in which we get the CD-ROM and the manual. According to the information on the cover of the manual, it can be concluded that the author of the graphic image is Andreja Medvedič, and of course her path has already been paved by master Plečnik. On both the CD-ROM and the box in which it is stored, there is a detail from the door of NUK on the cover, and on the back there is a photo of the entrance colonnade. Not being among the excessive enthusiasts of Plečniks work (by the way: among architects from the same period, I personally prefer Fabiani), I have to respect his attitude and attention to detail, which, in addition to an otherwise fairly flawless whole, can often tear the last nerve. Nonetheless Plečniks work should be included among the most beautiful features of the CD-ROM edition of the Slovenian Bibliography.

According to the instructions in the accompanying brochure, we need at least a 386 SX processor, Windows 3.1, 4 MB of memory, 2 MB of free space on the hard disk and, of course, a CD-ROM drive. Anything more, however, doesn’t hurt. Despite the fact that I tested the case on a significantly better configuration than the one just described, I was still surprised by the speed of operation.

Especially if I chose a simple search in which we can query a sufficient number of criteria so that a “bibliographically uninitiated” user will probably never have to resort to the so called demanding search. This is where we get complete information about the book, even if we only know who the author is, the word from the title, the year of publication, the subject code, the keyword, the publisher who published it, or the language in which it is written. Of course, it is also possible to use both abbreviated characters that are established in computer practice, the question mark, which replaces one character, and the asterisk, which replaces any number of characters. Despite the fact that some of these tags are quite bibliographically specific, even the average curious person does not feel lost in the program, as he has access to not only a selection of help at every step, but also a Dictionary button, which hides a field in which the flashing cursor is currently located. For all those who know the matter and would like to dedicate themselves to a demanding search, there is only a short explanation: we search in it with the help of search prefixes (these are the same as in the COBISS system), which we connect with operators.

After the search is completed, a list of all found units is displayed in the results window, which can be sorted by year of publication, authorship, title or publisher. Each printout is accompanied with a sign for the type of material (printed, handwritten, film, pictorial, multimedia …), serial number, title, author, year of publication and indication of the publisher. Most of the time, we are not satisfied with only finding the book we are looking for, but we also want to do something with it, for example, read it. In the case of browsing the bibliographic CD-ROM, we cannot read it immediately, but we can save the found data to the disk or print it. There are no problems with this rule, as the program allows you to select different types of printouts; you can choose between standard printout, ISBD printout, COMARD printout and user printout.

The Slovenian bibliography on the CD-ROM is adapted to all code tables that currently haunt Slovenian computers, and depending on what version of the letter layout we have in mind, we can choose between ASCII; YUASCII and Latin2 keyboard layouts. In addition, the program itself is bilingual, as we can also opt for English, which is still closer to many people on a computer screen and easier to understand than their mother tongue. The data that the program will browse nevertheless remains Slovenian and this fact cannot be changed. That is why it is a bilingual handbook – and it is with this bilingualism that a little awkwardness has crept in for the authors. We have already mentioned that it is possible to set different keyboard layouts, and that a table of characters is published in Appendix D. There is nothing special about the Slovene work, but it is a little different with the English Appendix D, where a barely distinct copy from the Slovene work is printed, which is why the descriptions of the columns (code, sign) are in Slovene. Of course, the observation of such minor setbacks (in an otherwise extremely transparent and useful manual) is really only a reflection of deliberate pickpocketing – you see, even though I initially decided to anger the editor, I must not exaggerate, but at least at the end of the review I should give him a patch so that the scratch on his pride won’t scaffold him too much.