Though recent technological developments have promised solutions to the costly problems of expanding card catalogs and changing cataloging practices, at the University of California libraries the problems have been compounded by a desire to stay compatible with the changing conventions of the Library of Congress and by an increasingly stringent budget. The reports of three committees at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) led to a decision in favor of the long-term goal of an on-line public catalog for all the UCLA libraries, with the intermediate goal of retaining the present public card catalogs until the on-line system is well established. This report reviews the essential criteria used to make that decision, including the advantages of the system, its relation to existing systems, problem areas, and costs. (EMH)