Presents guidelines developed by the ICOLC (International Coalition of Library Consortia) regarding vendor contracts and negotiations that involve electronic information resources. Highlights include content issues, including HTML, use of printers, and use of multimedia; and platform issues, including system architecture, access control, security…

Examines retrospective conversion in Spanish university libraries. Highlights include automated book collections; standardization; library cooperation; personnel; user access to online catalogs; and the reconversion situation and methods. Found that the fastest method of reconversion is by employing a vendor. (AEF)

Provides a checklist of concerns for libraries planning to implement shared research databases in a consortium environment, based on experiences at OhioLINK. Highlights include database selection criteria, licensing, pricing, funding, vendor considerations, database profiling, custom data processing, hardware selection, database access,…

A distributed union catalog is a network of bibliographic systems that cooperate to enable their users to discover sites that hold copies of known items. Some participating systems will be traditional union catalogs, others will be single sites with comprehensive collections, and others will be local or regional resource sharing systems. A…

The virtual Canadian union catalog (vCuc) project is a project among Canadian libraries to use Z39.50 (an information protocol standard) for searching distributed individual library catalogs and union catalogs. This paper summarizes the major technical, vendor, bibliographic data, and administrative issues that must be resolved before the…