Many of you have contacted us about the status of Data Desk version 7. The development process has been quite a long journey with several dead-ends encountered along the way—but the resulting product will be well worth the wait. We have re-worked the 1980s architecture to make it more customizable, extensible, and maintainable, but the program will still be fast, dynamic, and interactive.

Recently we put Data Desk 7 through some intensive testing by opening a file developed for our partner company, Library Dynamics. Library Dynamics offers a web-driven data analytics service that focuses on analyzing the current selection and acquisitions needs of libraries based on unique analyses of title holdings, copy level data, usage, and collection trends. The technology that drives this service is a complex Data Desk file that holds several million title records for almost 100 library collections. This file runs on a special version of Data Desk that connects with a web browser, allowing a user interact with the Data Desk file over the web.

Some new features include:

• Vertical icon windows that can be resized so that icon names are completely visible
• Dynamic attachment to external OLE DB and ODBC-compliant datafiles (Windows only)
• A web query tool that allows you to search for meta data on the web
• Wizards that offer assistance with menu commands
• More control over the look of plots, tables, and the desktop
• The ability to export plots as PNGs and tables as HTML
• Many new plots and statistical tools
• New functionality to existing commands

All of the new architectural work has been completed, so the most recent work has been focused on getting each of the legacy and new menu commands working. The screen shots below provide a view of what the new interface looks like. During the next few months we will keep you apprised of the version 7 development progress.