I posted something about this on the Blog site a week or so ago, and assume it was deleted, since other comments were put up after mine. I don't have a copy of it, since I didn't think to save, and since then I have made another discovery.
I have been a long time customer of LOGOS/Libronix. Since version 1.3, If I recall correctly, and used to have a stack of 3.5" diskettes to load, and only a handful of resources. I remember when I got my first CD - woohoo! What a boon to the company for thinking forward. I stayed with this tool since there was a commitment to our library's being our libraries. I liked that attitude and commitment. I added resources slowly in the first years, as I was a poor college student. When version 2 was released, it was a huge success, and I upgraded right away.
The challenge was that I seemed to lose some resources. I had so many that I just had a number to go by, and the new number was less than the old number (at the time, I had to do an open search and see the number of resources searched). I had lost a dozen or so resources, but had no idea what they were. I continued to stay with LOGOS. I had contacted tech support, but there was nothing they said they could do, unless I know what resources were missing to verify. I continued with what I had, after all in the scheme of things, I had nearly a thousand resources then and a dozen or so was not much.
Libronix3 was released, and once again, I was awed. It was a different tool, and was more than I had expected. I participated in the open betas and knew about the resource change issues and the single file resource changes and indexing for L3. It was tremendously faster, and I knew about the initial shortcomings. I made an informed decision.
However, once again, I lost resources. This time it was a significant number to me. And when calling tech support, I was again told that I need to provide the names, of which I could not do. Over 60 resources missing that time. I let it go again, since at that time, I had over 2500 resources and I would just deal with my library being short a few, though I knew that my third-party LOGOS purchases were few, and the L3 could read those dual-file resources as well.
L4 was released. I had not participated in the news groups for some time and so this was a complete surprise to me. I called to talk to tech support about the new version and asked if it would read all my resources, and I was assured it would have all my resources available.
I bought the portfolio this time. The discount was steep, and ~ $1500 (payments) were affordable for me at this time in my life. I later discovered that none of my video resources were available, and the power points that were part of my Standard Publishing sets were also not showing up. Not to mention that at the time of loading L4, I had over 3600 or so resources. After the load, I had 3999, according to the blank search box (no other way to see a bibliography that I found yet).
I was sadly disappointed again. I had again lost resources, though an increase in number, I believe that number should have been far greater. But I left it off to my not actually comparing the portfolio with what I had, and besides, there was just no way to make that comparison manually, there were just too many resources.
I had it loaded on my desktop and my laptop and they synchronized it was awesome (though “only” 3999 resources, I had not been able to match the resources on them before because of different install times, reinstalls etc, they had always been 2 or 3 resources off of each other.)
My laptop had failed in the last few days and so I reloaded it with Win7-64, and decided to make the jump. Installed everything from scratch. When it came to LOGOS, I decided to install from the Internet, as this is part of the selling point of the new L4! And it worked great! This was awesome. Except one thing. I lost resources.
Remember the 3999? Well, now my laptop has 3965. And my desktop still has 3999. Disappointing. Sadly disappointing.
I really love my LOGOS software and I do not believe that the over $13,000 that I have spent (what is tracked in my account, there are thousands more in third party purchases) is wasted. But I do wish there was a better way to track the resources. OCD? Maybe I am, but this is my library and I treat it as such and have it in my will to transfer to one of my children when I pass away. It is that important to me.
The new interface is something I am getting used to and have even created a shortcut. There are some missing features that I used a lot, but many of those are scheduled (though I thought, initially that they were available, and only found out afterwards that they were not). Logos, you have me. I am not going anywhere. I just wish that there was MORE COMMUNICATION up front about what this L4 actually was, and what was available in it; and how it might affect someone’s library and the way they use the tool.
