Unicorn/Symphony and indexing

These rumours keep on coming out of the woodwork…….. It has emerged on the Horizon-L list that indexing in Symphony is inferior to that in Horizon.  I’ve even checked this with a contact in the US. From what I can tell, keyword indexing in Unicorn/Symphony is handled by a dynamic indexer but it seems that the browse/ alphabetical indexes are only updated by scheduled batch jobs run overnight. Horizon has updated both sets of indexes in real time ever since I’ve been involved with it (over 8 years now) and because of this I’d assumed that real-time indexing was standard in modern Library Management Systems. Maybe I was wrong?

Jim Wilson put out an email to dampen the story saying that there is dynamic indexing in Symphony, although he didn’t distinguish between the 2 sets of indexes. I hope he was right. If this isn’t correct it is another serious weakness to be aware of. It also means that we have another question to ask at any LMS demonstration!

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