This article describes the activities of the U.S. Library of Congress Network Development Office and the present operation and future plans of the U.S. Library of Congress National Bibliographic Service. Emphasis is placed on demonstrating how the networking activities related to each other and the importance of this relationship. (Author/JAB)

Reviews present and international library networking activities, both in terms of the status quo in 1978 and, in the case of the United States, the efforts underway toward implementing a more coordinated and comprehensive system than presently available. The roles of various organizations/groups are also discussed. (Author/JD)

The thesis of this paper is that efficient functioning of a network is dependent upon the organization of bibliographic services so that the basic record for each bibliographic item is created once. This record must be minimally capable of serving the needs of libraries, information centers, abstracting and indexing services, and national and…

Reviews bibliographic control before and after the advent of machine-readable cataloging, and holds that new developments toward decentralization seem to counter the existing technological trend toward centralization of automated library services. (FM)

The national bibliographic services currently provided by the Library of Congress (LC) include the Machine-Readable Cataloging (MARC) service, LC's Automated Process Information File System, and the Library of Congress Subject Headings. Cooperative projects involving LC include COMARC (Cooperative MARC), a national bibliographic data base for…

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)

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)

Traces the development of library networking over the last 20 years, and examines the current attitude toward an integrated national network. The political and economic problems of the Linked Systems Project are discussed, as well as issues relating to copyright. (10 references) (Author/CLB)

Examines the background studies and high-priority projects which will lay the groundwork for the library bibliographic component of a National Library and Information Service Network and reviews the progress and problems of the national network as evidenced by current cooperative projects. (CWM)

Report on the status of automation within Library of Congress's Processing Services notes the positive effects of progress in cataloging activities, acquisitions activities, information retrieval, and dissemination of bibliographic products. Systems in operation, distribution services and products, and automation tasks not yet scheduled are…

Describes the background of the Linked Systems Project, which is designed to link existing bibliographic utilities into a national system of machine-readable bibliographic data and discusses directions being taken by the library community and why the OSI architecture was selected as the system protocol. (CLB)

The Library of Congress presents the history of its Machine Readable Cataloging (MARC) system. Descriptions of MARC pilot projects and distribution services are followed by a discussion of several conversion projects undertaken by libraries in order to implement MARC. Then MARC's influence on standardization of formats for information interchange,…