[WEB4LIB] CD's - aren't they dead yet?

[Bert Coenen]

Hi Tim, 
here in the law library in Leuven (Belgium) CD's are still very much alive and kicking. We still use quite a lot of databases on CD-rom; we don't use a cd tower, but copy all the disks to a network drive. 
Usually, the retrieval software is installed on that same network drive (for some databases the software has to be installed on the client computers) and users can access the databases from a web-browser. 
We use a program called Webcd, it's a free utility (it only works for Netscape) developped by the university of Utrecht (the Netherlands), you can check a previous posting of mine (on netscape problems) for the correct URL. 
The advantage webcd has over the other weblauncher that we experimented with (a program called Weblaunch -I do not remember where I got it from but if you do a search on it you should easily find it) is that it makes it impossible for the user to open more than one database at the same time (which is really important for us, since all our databases map to the same drive letter and launching one database would crash other active databases). 
The main disadvantages of webcd were these: as a program it's heavier -and slower- than weblaunch and it appears to be slightly more prone to crashing.

Bert