The five critical years in the development of OCLC (1951-56), the culmination of a century of cooperation between Ohio's colleges and universities, are used to underscore its expansion into a bibliographic utility interconnecting 2400 institutions in the United States and Canada. There are 19 references. (RAA)

This feasibility study was conducted to (1) estimate the alternative costs in 1980 Canadian dollars of using four bibliographic utilities to accomplish the retrospective conversion (RECON) of eight British Columbia public libraries' manual card catalog files, (2) make recommendations as to which alternative should be selected and how it should be…

This Systems and Procedures Exchange Center (SPEC) kit on retrospective conversion, which replaces a 1975 kit on reclassification, is based on interviews with and documents from Association of Research Libraries (ARL) members participating in retrospective conversion (recon). (Reclassification is almost always conducted as a sub-project of…

Suggests ways of using computers to access the periodical literature including integrated public access catalogs; natural language display; network access to area union lists; links between indexing and location tools; access to journal content through the online catalog; broadened search capabilities; and remote user access with document…

In 1988, the Associated College Libraries of Central Pennsylvania received a grant to create a value-added, compact disk, union catalog from the U.S. Department of Education's College Library Technology and Cooperative Grants Program, Title II of the Higher Education Act. Designed to contain, in time, 2,000,830 records from 17 member library…

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)

When the Higher Education Library Information Network of Rhode Island transferred members' bibliographic data into a shared online public access catalog (OPAC), 10% of the University of Rhode Island's monograph records were missing. This article describes the consortium's attempts to retrieve records from the database and the effectiveness of…

Identifies the several functions which contribute to the total bibliographic record structure of the country, dividing the bibliographic record system by market type--government, nonprofit, and for-profit--and by function--shared cataloging, interlibrary loans, online catalogs, circulation control, serials control, and acquisitions. (Author/JL)

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…

Compares the effectiveness of five online systems in facilitating interlibrary services. The OCLC Interlibrary Loan (ILL) subsystem, the Research Libraries Group (RLG) Message System, the University of Toronto Library Automation System (UTLAS), and two others are evaluated with respect to the request verification, location, request transmission,…

Discussion of online authority control in library catalogs highlights a system for shared authority work among libraries participating in the Illinois statewide online union catalog, ILLINET Online. Topics discussed include the design of the ILLINET Online database; staff training procedures; documentation in the form of manuals; communication;…

Description of the planning of a project designed to test the feasibility of distributing a statewide union catalog database on optical disk discusses the relationship of the project's goals to those of statewide library development; dealing with vendors in a volatile, high technology industry; and plans for testing and evaluation. (EM)

This theme issue discusses the Illinois Library and Information Network (ILLINET). Topics addressed include network components, the interlibrary loan code, the resource sharing union catalog, the OCLC users' group, OCLC's EPIC service, access to indexing services, SILO (Serials of Illinois Libraries Online) members, and excerpts from the…

Systems and networks have been a fact of life in Indiana for several years. The Area Library Services Authority, the Indiana Cooperative Library Services Authority, the Indiana Union List of Serials, the statewide TWX network, and others are documented with emphasis on the participation of specialized libraries. (Author)

The last few years have seen increasing interest in library networking in Australia from a number of different groups. All the projects have concerned networks of similar libraries and no parallel to U.S.A. developments of networks encompassing a variety of types of libraries has yet appeared. (Author)