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.