I have been working with SPIN and SPAS for some time. They are powerful and
evolving products. I highly recommend SPIN for its flexibility in construct-
ing a variety of types of search. The Faculty interests match capability is
especially powerful, although we have not yet figured out how to manage the
distribution of many hits to a large faculty with a very small staff.I am
looking into some strategies for automating this function further.

InfoEd will add a batch mode to their SPIN MICRO search engine this summer,
making it possible to run an unsupervised set of searches each time they
send an update on disk(bi-weekly, in our case).

InfoEd (vendor of SPIN) is also experimenting with daily downloads of the CBD
preselected for items of interest to universities, thus sparing us from the
necessity of reviewing more material than necessary every day. We are developin
g software tools for automating downloading from our mailbox to a PC, for
posting announcements on our Gopher service and for reviewing and extracting
announcements of interest for further handling. I hope there will be enough
interest in their CBD service that they decide to market it and add selected
Federal Register announcements too. We plan to abandon the print editions,
since they are in the library as well, and apply the saving to the more useful
(for us) electronic subscriptions.

InfoEd has been VERY responsive to suggestions for enhancements to their
software, and to meeting specialized user needs. I do not understand what the
complaint was about their marketing approach: to me they have been very
considerate.

If you are interested about CBD on-line from them, call Ed Johnson at
(518)466-0691 or e-mail xxxxxx@office.org - I would like to see some others
work with this service and compare experiences.

If anyone has any hot tips to share in working with SPIN, I would be most
interested.