The Worcester Area Cooperating Libraries is a system composed of public, academic and special libraries. In fiscal 1970-71, an expanded interlibrary loan service utilizing a daily shuttle between the participating libraries was implemented. This report describes and analyzes the interlibrary shuttle service, and presents an analysis of the…

The civil liberties issues involved in the keeping of public records certainly arose prior to the use of computers, but automated information systems have, beyond any question, aggravated those issues involved in all areas of application and have made the need for legal protection crucial, if we are not to see a synergistic development of national…

Discusses the purpose of mathematical models and reviews the phases of the modeling process--defining performance, representing the problem, predicting performance, estimating parameters, defining optimization criterion, determining solution, and implementing results. Reviews of book-use, resource allocation, and library network models are…

The application of systems engineering and operations research to the problems of libraries has developed quite strongly during the past five years. The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to this relatively new area. There are serious problems of applying systems engineering to libraries. This is to be expected in the case of a…

The growth and development of library networks increased the need for more rapid interlibrary communication. This survey describes the history, costs and recent developments of various means of interlibrary communication. Extensive references are provided for each area. The communications systems discussed are: surveys, mail, telephone, facsimile,…

The report, submitted to the Illinois State Library, covers the period July 1, 1973 through June 30, 1974. Included in it are: (1) a list of the board of directors and other representatives of the system, (2) a list of the head librarians at each of the branch libraries, (3) a list of the system staff and the heads of individual system-wide…

Statistical and directory information are provided in one volume. The 1975-76 statistics cover public libraries in five population ranges: bookmobiles, academic libraries, special libraries, state agency, and county law libraries. The data covers income, staffing and salaries, expenditures, materials, and activities. The first of three directory…

Statistical and directory information for California are provided in one volume. The 1974-75 statistics cover library systems, public libraries in five population ranges, bookmobiles, academic libraries, special libraries, state agency and institution libraries, and county law libraries. Public library statistics for 1973-74 also are included. The…

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…