What is WEBLIS?

WebLIS is a CDS/ISIS based Library Integrated System for WWW environment that is distributed free-of-charge by UNESCO since mid of the year 2004.

The main modules of the WebLIS system:

• the data entry module which allows to maintain a library catalogue comprising records that describe various types of bibliographical materials – monographs (2 levels), articles (3 levels), serials as well as miscellaneous materials;
• the search module which is an OPAC (on-line public access catalogue) module that provides three modes of searching the catalogue – simple retrieval, advanced retrieval and thesaurus based retrieval;
• the loan module that comprises basic procedures dealing with loan system management and that is fully integrated with the library catalogue.

All data of the WebLIS system are stored in CDS/ISIS databases and all these modules are accessed from an Internet browser (fourth module of WebLIS is called ISIS-Statistica and it is a stand-alone Windows application for statistical analysis of WebLIS data). WebLIS has been developed by the software house ICIE and it uses as a server the WWW-ISIS program prepared by this company (this CGI program uses ISIS-DLL to process CDS/ISIS databases). In order to avoid confusion with the WWWISIS program developed by BIREME in this paper we will call the WWW-ISIS program ISIS3W (this is a name of executable file of the WWW-ISIS program).

In contrast to other members of the CDS/ISIS software family, WebLIS has not been designed as a multilingual system and therefore language dependant elements of its user interface have not been stored in separate databases. Original WebLIS user interface is in English and it has been split among numerous files residing in several directories. These files contain data in various formats – some of them are text files, others are HTML files or templates and majority of them are print formats that output CDS/ISIS data with appropriate HTML tags. All these factors make internationalization of the WebLIS system a much more complicated task than in case of other programs belonging to CDS/ISIS family. Translation of the WebLIS system interface requires not only good knowledge of the CDS/ISIS system and HTML format, but also basic knowledge on functionality and organization of the WebLIS system.

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