Nota Bene: Caveat Scriptor
Merlin H. Forster, Margo Milleret · Hispania · 1985
In a recent newsletter (Summer, 1985) and a subsequent special announcement to its members, the Modern Language Association has endorsed for the first time, and is currently marketing, an integrated word processing and data base management package for use on microcomputers (Nota Bene, Dragonfly Software Company, $495 list price, special price of $396 to MLA members). Writing for PC Magazine (July 23, 1985, p. 64), Stephen Manes takes note of that unusual endorsement and underlines the Association's intention to market directly to its own members and those of related organizations. We found the MLA announcement to be of immediate interest, since we are in the initial stages of an extensive annotated bibliography on the avant-garde in Latin America. We have available for project use an IBM PC-XT (20 MB hard disk capacity), but up to this point our searches for adequate software support have been largely unsuccessful. Most packages have been designed for business use and are not adaptable to our needs. The excellent Finder/Search Companion retrieval system, designed by Aaron/Smith Associates for library use, was promising as an integrated system, but the entire package would have cost nearly $2,000. In that context Nota Bene appeared to offer integration of various important functions, multilingual word processing, and the generation of cross-listings and indexes at a price which was acceptable. On the strength of those announced capabilities we ordered Nota Bene, have installed it on our system, and have begun to make use of it in our project. We should note that we are not programmers nor computer scientists, but we do have several years combined experience in word processing and data base management on both microcomputers and mainframe systems. It is precisely our intention to use Nota Bene extensively that motivates our comments in the pages of Hispania. This review is a preliminary assessment of the package as we have installed it and have been able to use it up to this point. After we have had an opportunity to test Nota Bene's capabilities with materials from our own project, we will provide a more complete evaluation. At this moment, however, we will describe the package for potential AATSP users, omment on the installation process, and provide an evaluation of the support and training materials.