Five years ago, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) funded an Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) study of the impact of new information and communications technologies on the roles of health sciences libraries in a radically changing health care and educational environment. A key recommendation of the resulting report called for…

Library automation in Canada is complicated by the large size, dispersed population, and cultural diversity of the country. The National Library of Canada is actively planning a Canadian library network based on national bibliographic services for which the library is now developing automated systems. Canadian libraries are involved in the…

Consideration of problems associated with development of national database for bibliographic control of library materials, focuses on those which "alert" individual directors, and those created by organizations and people not under immediate control. Standards, objectives, change, ownership and distribution, economic and legal issues,…

This discussion of the use of authority control to ensure consistency of headings in machine-readable and card catalogs highlights the basic concepts and rationale of authority control and library catalogs, and efforts of the Library of Congress and bibliographic utilities. Six references and causes of name variations are appended. (EJS)

The nine papers presented in this report attempt to discuss and describe Canadian library networks and systems as they exist today and as they are being planned for future development at the local, provincial, regional, and national levels. The first report provides, as an example, an overview of library systems and networking in Britain as they…

Four intertwined issues in networking--local systems, linking, linking standards, and database ownership--need to be dealt with by bibliographic utilities and librarians, as their members, in the very near future. The resolution of these major issues will significantly affect the future direction of nationwide networking. (Author)

A comprehensive automated authority system in place as a part of an integrated database having the flexibility to produce any catalog format is proposed as a means of making the library catalog--whether manual or online--more responsive to comprehensive authority changes, including standards and practices, and more useful to the library patron as…

This paper reports on the development of an online union catalog of serials using OCLC by the Central New York Library Resources Council. The project, now in the third of four years, is converting from a hard copy union catalog of serials to an online catalog that will have the important advantage of immediate update. Using the OCLC interlibrary…

This description of the Africa Bibliographic Centre (ABC) concept--which is still in a formative stage--provides brief summaries of the 12 components of the system, including an African lending library, bibliographic publishing, a commission on information and bibliographic systems, an African microfiche publications center, African abstracting…

Suggests ways of using computers to access the periodical literature including integrated public access catalogs; natural language display; network access to area union lists; links between indexing and location tools; access to journal content through the online catalog; broadened search capabilities; and remote user access with document…

Discusses results of opinion poll conducted by Library and Information Technology Association of 334 academic, public, government, and corporate libraries concerning authority control in the online environment. Use of authority files on bibliographic utilities, presence of online catalogs, Library of Congress authority records, and comments from…

Discusses design features of the Online Catalog of LS/2000, OCLC's enhanced version of Integrated Library System. This minicomputer-based system provides bibliographic file maintenance, circulation control, and online catalog searching. Examples of available displays--holdings, full MARC, work forms, keyword entry, index selection, brief citation,…

Describes and analyzes various methods of automated authority control currently available and suggests questions to ask when considering purchase of system. Highlights include manual versus automated authority control and levels of service in automated authority systems (network, vendor). Glossary of terminology and list of networks and vendors…

Goals of micropreservation project at New York Public Library are twofold: to improve in-house processing and control of microforms (updating bibliograhic information, adding records to Research Libraries Information Network database, inspecting archival master negatives) and to participate in national preservation effort (supplementing…

Discussion of the effect of computer technology on library automation and networking highlights added benefits and added costs, autonomous past, pressure for standardization, rise of bibliographic utilities (e.g., OCLC, Research Library Information Network, Washington Library Network), return to decentralization, distributed processing,…