Any librarian who has managed electronic resources has experienced the--for want of words--"joy" of gathering and analyzing usage statistics. Such statistics are important for evaluating the effectiveness of resources and for making important budgeting decisions. Unfortunately, the data are usually tedious to collect, inconsistently organized, of…

This discussion paper seeks to highlight the need for standardization in the development of computer and telecommunications systems in Australian libraries to ensure an inbuilt capacity to interconnect with other systems. It presents a proposal for the establishment of an on-going mechanism responsible for identifying and developing standards…

A committee on rules fur cataloging machine readable data files (MRDF) recommends areas for revision of the Anglo American Cataloging Rules to integrate collections of MRDF into the mainstream of bibliographic control. The 12 working papers which support and detail these recommendations are appended to this report. They include rationales for…

Describes an interface mechanism called "complex view support" to be used with a relational database system (RDBS) in supporting increasingly complex distributed environments in automated library systems. The interface system refers queries to multidimensional tables as well as to flat tables on RDBS and is shown to efficiently support…

Discusses possibility of using expert systems to develop new model in cataloging theory made necessary by technological progress, rising user expectations, and economic pressures. A data structure for bibliographic information required by Anglo American Cataloging Rules, 2nd edition, (AACR2) is suggested, and possible heuristics for interpreting…

A cost/benefit analysis of the Public Library Automation Network (PLAN) project was undertaken to evaluate those areas in library technical processing impacted by BALLOTS: searching the data base for catalog copy; cataloging with MARC or original catalog copy input by participating libraries; data entry of original records and modification of…

The conversion of the shelf-lists of the University Library of Bucknell University to machine-readable form is described in this report. The selection of specific content, machine considerations, and use cost tradeoffs are discussed in the first sections. The actual procedures used in the entering of information into the system, together with the…

Reports on a survey measuring the performance of a merging algorithm used to generate the now-defunct ULM (Union List of Monographs) file for ALEPH, Israel's research library network. Discusses automatic detection and merging of duplicate bibliographic records, problems created by lack of a standard for Hebrew spelling, and methods for measuring…

The Southwestern Library Interstate Cooperative Endeavor (SLICE) project was an "experimental effort to determine the feasibility of a multi-state library coordination agency" involving the states of Arizona, Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. The success or failure of the project's specific objectives are outlined in…

Recognizing that the major technical direction of this decade is toward proximity of computing function to its users, the Research Libraries Group (RLG) is moving to distribute its processing capabilities. The goals of this study were to formulate an architecture for an RLG distributed system, to identify pre-existing components appropriate for…

BALLOTS is a computerized system to support acquisitions and cataloging in the Stanford University Libraries. The system is divided into ten computerized functions, each supporting a specific type of library processing. The library staff communicates on-line with the system using four on-line files for searching: the MARC file, the In Process…

This study shows strategies which can be used to plan and implement the Canadian National Library's bibliographic data base and the systems which it is to support. The data base would be a subset of a national bibliographic data base which can be brought together in the context of the projected Canadian Library and Information Retrieval Center.…