Editorial
The Best of All Possible Worlds (p.173)
SUSAN K. MARTIN
Feature Articles
The Washington Library Network's Computerized
Bibliographic System (p.174-199)
MARY JANE POBST REED
The Washington Library Network is developing a computer-assisted bibliographic system to speed and expand library operations throughout the state. Features include MARC format with all content designators, subject and name authority files, sorting by LC rules, and stringent quality control. Future modules will add acquisition/accounting and circulation support. On-line capabilities are currently under development.
This paper describes the present batch-mode cataloging support subsystem, its history, operation, impacts, problems, costs. Present developmental efforts toward on-line integrated acquisitions and cataloging support are indicated.
State of the Nation in Networking (p.200-220)
BRETT BUTLER
(no abstract available)
Initial Article Filing in Computer-Based
Book Catalogs: Techniques, Problems, and Article Frequencies (p.221-247)
CHARLES P. BOURNE
This report is concerned with one part of the problem of computer implementation of library filing rules, namely the handling of initial articles in many languages. A brief review is given of the general computer-based methods used for filing catalog records. With a catalog for an academic library collection of approximately 750,000 title entries and over 50,000 initial article character strings, an empirical study was made of the frequency of misfiling that would occur for each article if simple table lookup procedures were used for the ninety-three different articles studied. Including all of these articles in a simple table lookup program without language codes would result in the computer misfiling of approximately 6.3 percent of the title entries according to library filing rules. A strategy is suggested which reduces this error rate.
Technical Communications
In Transition: The Systems Librarian in
the 1980s (p.260-261)
THOMAS F. PARKER