Re: advice sought
Paul Shippert (mailto:mbms@ATC.AMERITEL.NET)
Wed, 1 Nov 1995 10:23:52 -0500
Message-Id: <mailto:199511011534.JAA18356@library.wustl.edu>
Date: Wed, 1 Nov 1995 10:23:52 -0500
From: Paul Shippert <mailto:mbms@ATC.AMERITEL.NET>
Subject: Re: advice sought
To: Multiple recipients of list IMAGELIB
> We are about to acquire a large collection of political papers. We
> hope to digitize some small part of the collection as images and as
> OCR text during the first year. The images will be photographs and
> text of letters and other documents. Nothing fancy. I must now buy
> equipment. The question is should we buy Mac or IBM? There are
> certain problems on this campus with going Mac. For example, the
> campus network does not do a good job of supporting remote access by
> Mac--and this project is off campus. My Mac friends tell me about the
> superiority of MacIntosh for images. It seems to me, however, that
> IBM-compatible equipment is a cheaper, simpler solution especially
> since our campus is Windows-oriented. For a project such as ours
> where I don't think the graphics will be particulary sophisticated, is
> there a big advantage to going Mac that would be more important than
> price and an institutional bias against Macs? Thanks for your help.
>
> Errol Stevens
> Loyola Marymount University
> mailto:estevens@lmumail.lmu.edu
>
>
Greetings and salutations, Errol
It seems to me that you may have 'answered your own questions.' If
the campus network is the vehicle for your primary "target audience," then
indeed, it would seem to make sense to purchase the most compatible
equipment. Also, while it may have been true in the past that Macintosh
computers were superior for graphics, that gap has narrowed to the point
where cost becomes the central issue.
There are other configurations and operating systems 'out there'
which you may also wish to consider. A majority of servers on the internet
are Unix-based machines, and some rather sophisticated graphics programs are
available for that platform. My knowledge of Unix, Sun, and other OSs
besides DOS/Windows is limited, however; unix is a memory-intensive OS which
may put your hardware costs out of reach. (The same, I believe, applies to
Sun and other non-DOS OSs.) Should you decide to go with DOS/Windows
boxes, I am certain a number of professionals subscribing to this listserv
can offer good advice regarding necessary hard- and software.
Good luck with your project.
Regards,
Paul Shippert
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Paul A. Shippert mailto:mbms@atc.ameritel.net
Margaret Brent Middle School
Library Media Center FAX 301/884-8931
Helen MD 20635 301/884-4635, -4636
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