Software catalog in Basque

1997/03/01 Sarasola, Kepa Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Softwarea

The catalogue of software in Basque that we will offer below was organized by the UEU Department of Informatics last year. It must be located within the meetings, for this purpose it was prepared to publicize the software that can currently be used in Basque.

The realization of this work of compilation seemed fundamental to us to raise the experiences and problems existing in the production of software in Basque, as well as to detect the shortcomings that currently exist in the software in Basque. Last September we opened the call to participate in the catalogue. The following files were answered to the call, although to show the information received in a structured, understandable and practical way we had to make some decisions.

We have received information from many programs that focus on educational software. This area of application has a fundamental dynamic due to the expansion of the process of Euskaldunization in teaching and the promotion of the EIMA program of the Department of Education of the Basque Government. Last year the EIMA program published the catalogue of all computer programs created under its protection. This educational software catalog includes 409 different products made in the last 10 years. That is, ten times more than the amount of products that have occurred outside education have emerged from the educational world! In order to improve the presentation of products not directly related to education, we decided to discatalog educational software, always informing the catologist of the EIMA program.

EIMA Educational Software Collection
1995. Department
of Education, Universities and Research. Basque Government Central
Publications
Service. Vitoria-Gasteiz 1996 ISBN
84-457-1063-X

Apart from educational software, we considered it appropriate to classify the rest of the products. We have differentiated three types of software: general software, applications and multimedia content presentation CD-ROM. The general software block has classified operating systems, text processors and computer networking tools.

Most applications are database query systems that are obtained through networks, floppy disks or CD-ROM and in many of them the database topic is the reference work (encyclopedia, dictionary or atlas). However, there are other applications such as voice knowledge packages and statistical data presentation. Finally, we have included in the last group several multimedia CD-ROMs for the presentation of contents. These programs deal with a topic through multimedia.

From the UEU Department of Informatics we want to have this catalogue updated; if you are a creator or producer of a new software in Basque, please contact us. (email address ueu@eusnet.org).