This paper presents a novel approach to designing an online, open-source course in systems librarianship, an area of librarianship that may be perceived as complex and intimidating because of the technologies involved. The course design focuses on making systems librarianship more approachable for library and information science students who may…

Backups are a modern fact of life. Every organization that has any kind of computing technology (and that is all of them these days) needs to back up its data in case of technological or user errors. Traditionally, large-scale backups have been done via an internal or external tape drive that takes magnetic tapes (minicassettes, essentially) and…

A 2010 electronic resource management survey conducted by Maria Collins of North Carolina State University and Jill E. Grogg of University of Alabama Libraries found that the top six electronic resources management priorities included workflow management, communications management, license management, statistics management, administrative…

Over the past several decades, millions of digital objects of significant scientific, economic, cultural, and historic value have been published and distributed to libraries and archives on removable media. Providing long-term access to these documents, media files, and software executables is an increasingly complex task because of dependencies…

There are two principal aspects of automation: the theoretical, or systems area, and the practical or production side. This paper outlines the lessons learned and the problems encountered in planning and implementing an automation program. (Author/NH)

Subroutines which provide efficient access to a directly organized file by blocking and deblocking variable length bibliographic records are described. (Author)

Describes automated storage and retrieval (AS/R) techniques and discusses benefits, conservation considerations, and costs of the AS/R approach to the storage of library books. Thirteen annotated references are listed. (MES)

The direct-chaining technique of hash coding is generalized in a manner that is useful for storing records on the basis of non-unique search keys. Two hash functions are used, a process implying a tree structure. Two models, one involving unique and the other non-unique keys, are presented. (7 references) (Author/KE)

Describes a system that provides online access to holdings information for more than 4,500 journals on a single self-executing diskette. A brief discussion of data compression is offered, along with program listings in both BASIC and C. (MES)

Provides an overview of indexing in database management systems to provide librarians with more understanding of the possibilities and limitations of current information systems. Sequential, direct, indexed sequential, and virtual sequential file accessing methods are explained, and various binary tree structures are described. (EAM)

Gives an overview of MEDLARS II as an example of a major bibliographic processing system that supports on-line access to a number of very large files, has efficient throughput, and is operated on a single large-scale computer. (Author/PF)

Problems, issues, and alternatives in designing individual, stand alone systems for servicing selected library operations, with emphasis on problems of integrating these with major automated systems, a new mode of operation called coupling, and strategies for dealing with large amounts of retrospective data. (Author/LS)

Review and discussion of the techniques of automatic format recognition (AFR) of bibliographic data. Comparison of record-building facilities of Library of Congress, University of California (both AFR techniques), and Ohio College Library Center (non-AFR). Projection of a next logical generation, original format recognition. (Author/LS)

The rules for catalog entries and punctuation outlined in this manual were used to prepare a computer-produced union catalog of the holdings of several libraries at the Eastman Kodak Company. The computer sorts digitally, considering first blanks, then punctuation marks, letters, and finally numbers. This results in a filing sequence which differs…

The 116 citations on book catalogs are divided into the following two main sections: (1) Selected References, in alphabetic sequence by personal or institutional author and (2) Anonymous Entries, in alphabetic sequence by title. One hundred and seven of the citations cover the years 1960 through March 1969. There are five scattered citations in…