Dear All Thank you all for taking your time to replying my query on Winnebago
Sagebrush products. Here are all the replies I've got. You all are great. I am
sorry I did not include the names for each response as it will be too long.
Sureshnie Dissanayake
Asst. Librarian
Overseas School of Colombo
Sri Lanka
sdissanayake@osc.lk
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While I have no experience with the newer Sagebrush, I do have an opinion about
Spectrum Circ/Cat. We use this program quite successfully in our small district.
We have a K-2 school, a 3-5 school, a 6-8 school, and then our students go on to a
regional high school that also uses Circ/Cat. in the k-8 schools we have just
under 2000 students. We do not enter periodicals in the circ system, so that
feature isn't a selling point for us. I like the price of Circ/Cat, the ease of
use for both students and staff, and the tech support. Good luck with your
decision. You certainly are asking the right group ! We ALWAYS have our opinions
!
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I have only used the Spectrum Suite and I was happy with it though it really
doesn't do a great job either with periodicals. I ended up putting the
issue date in the author field and got it to work that way even though I
know that's incorrect. A Spectrum salesperson told me in June that they are
going to stop upgrading Spectrum so long-term that may not be the way to go.
My replacement when I retired had used Follett and wanted to switch to that
but changed her mind because of cost.
Good luck making this decision.
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When we automated ten years ago we went with Winnebago Spectrum as it was
the most user friendly for our K - 8 students. This is the only system I
have used, but I am happy with it. I can't give you any comparisons.
Good luck.
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Good morning! My school district is using InfoCentre this year. We had Winnebago
for years, but moved to a new computer system and it would no longer work, thus we
purchased InfoCentre.
My recommendation to you would be to wait just a bit to convert to InfoCentre.
There are aspects of it that are nice, but Sagebrush has not gotten a lot of the
bugs and quirks out of the program yet. For example, there is not an option to do
any batch processing right now in InfoCentre. Also, there are some bugs in the card
catalog system that makes it not work to its potential either.
I'd be happy to go into more specifics if you'd like, but as I said earlier, I'd
wait a bit for upgrades on InfoCentre before purchasing.
Just my two cents worth!
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I had Winnebago at my last school and loved it. Now I have Follett at my new school
and hate it. It basically does the same things- the main difference is with
Winnebago you can easily switch between tasks. With Follett you have to have to
open each component separately. It is quite annoying.
I have not used InfoCentre in my library personally, however, I did go to a seminar
on it and am planning to switch to it. It seemed a lot better then either Follett
or Winnebago. With InfoCentre you can fully customize your reports. The interface
is also really simple. I loved it.
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I have used Winnebago for 25 years and would never go to Follett. We have just
seen a presentation on Infocenter and soon will go with that, it looks great!
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We have recently converted from Winnebago CIRC/CAT to InfoCentre. I like
the InfoCentre program, and believe that it is going to be an excellent
program in the near future. It has some wonderful features, including built
in ZMarc cataloging, a merge records feature, and the on-line catalog.
However, I will also tell you frankly that the current version has some
bugs, most of them minor, a few of them fairly serious, and most of them
annoying. The company is working hard to fix them, and a major update is
coming out in the next couple of months. If would not discount InfoCentre
from consideration, but I would cousel not planning to go up with it until
next year, when the first program upgrade version is available. Hope this
is helpful.
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I'm certain you've received a lot of replies by now, but I'll just say that we had
Winnebago circ/cat and then upgraded to Spectrum. We changed to InfoCentre in
Sept. It's a program in "progress," meaning it has a LOT of bugs and is
unfinished. The company (Sagebrush) has promised a "fix" this month, but it is not
as good as Spectrum was. Now we're sorry we didn't go with Follett. The best
thing about Infocentre is that it allows us (as Macintosh users) to put our catalog
on the web. Spectrum would only run on the old Mac operating system (9) and now
all Macs are using operating system 10 and we felt Sagebrush would no longer
support Spectrum for Macs.Please post a hit if you haven't already done so.
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