Anne:
Depending on your on-line catalog software, there should be a way to
block out fields that might contain confidential information from
remote users, or other categories of users. That would argue for a
button on your web site which brings you, through telnet, to your
catalog. On the other hand, extracting data from your on line catalog
in a form that is searchable from the web site should be no problem,
except for updating. If your web site is being "out-sourced" and
maintained on someone elses server, that would certainly be a serious
"firewall" to prevent access to your data.
In the Garden's case, as far as I understand it, the library catalog
is maintained on a separate server which can be accessed through
telnet. Our own web site is still not implemented, so I'm not sure
how the connection to the catalog will finally be established.
I haven't heard of any serious security concerns, either about data
integrity, confidential collections information, or hacking through
the public pages to system level access. If you want more technical
information, please send me, off list, the technical details of your
two proposed set ups and I can forward that to the Garden's technical
people.
Eric Siegel
Director of Corporate and
Science Development
The New York Botanical Garden
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