Minutes of the Optical Technology Special Interest Group, 4
October 1995

The minutes of the previous meeting were adopted without
amendment, and there were no matters arising from the minutes for
discussion.

The chairman, Andrew Freeman, urged people to contact Purchasing
Australia if they wished to comment on the DAS Contract for
Optical Technologies, as this is under review at present.

Arthur Langford-Smith brought to the attention of the meeting a
1/2 day session on electronic records being organised for 1
November.  He also mentioned that the 1996 conference of the
Records Management Association of Australia will be held in
Canberra.

Guest speakers 1.  Patrick Turner, Marketing Manager, Business
Information Systems, Kodak Australia

Mr Turner spoke to the meeting about new initiatives in document
imaging.  Kodak is currently working on DocumentCD, a product
offering features such as a retrieval engine, database, image
viewer and images in an integrated way.   He also described the
Kodak System 2000 and System 2100 products.  The latter will be
released in 1996, with 25 gigabyte platters, and 4 dual-head
drives per library.  It is expected that 50 gigabyte platters
will be available by 1998, and possibly as much as 200 gigabytes
by the turn of the century, as a result of a venture with IBM.

The Image Library is about to be released, and provides a set of
services based around storage and retrieval facilities for large
data volumes.  The services of Image Library will be particularly
important for customers such as large government registries, and
will shield them for technological obsolescence.

2. Dan Daley, Canon

Mr Daley described the features of Canon Exchange, an electronic
document management system from Canon. The product conforms to
the recently issued public service guidelines for the management
of electronic documents.  It runs on a Unix system, and takes
control of all electronic documents on the network.  The users of
the network are forced by the system to classify all saved
documents.

Each user has a personal work area, but all non-personal
documents are available to other users.  The system uses a
built-in thesaurus, applying a standard set of document
descriptors to aid retrieval.  Original versions of documents are
protected from change.  The product is being launched in
November-December 1995.

The Wednesday, 6 December 1995 meeting of the Optical Technology
Special Interest Group (Australian Public Service applications)
(OTSIG) will feature speakers on the theme 'Cost effective
approaches to optical technologies'. The meeting will be held at
10.30 am on in the Community Room, Belconnen Library, 12 Chandler
Street, Belconnen, ACT.