Reports the methodology and results of a study which explored the potential of three approaches to sampling the Australian Bibliographic Network (ABN) database files for determining collection overlap among Australian libraries. (Author/CLB)

Developed at the beginning of the decade to serve as a union catalog for identifying the holdings in all University of California (UC) libraries, the MELVYL online catalog as of October 1989 contained 10 million holdings for over 5 million monographic titles of print and nonprint materials, and more than 1.2 million periodicals holdings which…

Prepared to inform and update Boston College faculty and administrative personnel on the impact of automation and resource sharing on the Boston College library system and the services it provides, this report contains sections on: OCLC and its interlibrary loan subsystem; the consortia in which the Boston College libraries participate; present…

A regionally organized program for serials bibliography is proposed because of the large volume of complex data needing control and the many purposes to which the data can be put in support of regional or local needs. (2 references) (Author)

There are a great number of federal libraries in Ottawa which change as frequently as the programs of the departments they serve. The three major libraries are: the Library of Parliament, the National Science Library and the National Library of Canada, with the latter two serving the entire country. This paper was presented at the Special Library…

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…

This report describes the multidimensional scaling (MDS) method for interpreting collection overlap based on the number of books held by pairs of libraries in large groups (as many as 100 libraries or more). MDS results for four groups of libraries sampled from the OCLC database are also presented. MDS is described as a class of data-analytic or…

Results of Pittsburgh Regional Library Center Serials Cancellation Project are discussed, providing insight into problems and opportunities of multi-institution collection management decision-making using the online catalog. Previous attempts to coordinate collection management decisions, cancellation of serial titles, an online standard code for…

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…

Describes the functions of the National Zoological Park Branch of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, which is dedicated to supporting the special information needs of the zoo. Topics covered include the library's history, collection, programs, services, future plans, and relations with other zoo libraries. (two references) (Author/CLB)

An investigation was made of the Nashville Union Catalog to explore the possibility of its expansion into a regional catalog and making it the nucleus of a bibliographic center serving the state of Tennessee. The primary objectives were investigation of: the catalog and its format possibilities; the structural organization, and required funding,…

This paper describes the state of library resource networks in Canada, raises issues that must be faced by the Resource Network Committee of the National Library Advisory Board, and outlines some of the resource sharing measures and experimental projects undertaken by the National Library of Canada, the Canadian Book Exchange Centre, and other…

This paper focuses on cataloging and classification, which are the most time consuming of library operations, requiring highly trained staff and involving considerable expense, to provide an overview of the concepts and considerations for centralized cataloging and interlibrary loans. Centralized cataloging is defined as a cooperative arrangement…

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…

Written when an in-house retrospective conversion project on the monographs collection of an academic library was 80% complete, this paper presents factors for consideration by decision-makers prior to establishing a similar project. Topics considered together with a description of how North Carolina State University (NCSU) handled each, include:…