ation. As it was conceived, therefore, it was designed to be uniquely suited to the task of facilitating, streamlining, and improving the quality and quantity of research.
But the foregoing explanation should not be misunderstood as an unqualified paean to OCLC, which magically fixed everything that ailed the library's card catalogue. Indeed, online indexing of information did not step into a cataloging void. Both before and after the OCLC overtook other computerized indexing systems as something of an industry standard, debates over methods of cataloging among library professionals continued to rage. Consider the implications of a 1974 survey conducted by the Association of Research Libraries, in the early days of OCLC implementation (ARL, Office of Management Studies, 1975). At this time, Dartmouth College, as well as universities in Utah, Maryland and Connecticut were implementing new cataloging systems by means of reordering index/subject headings, creating appropriate informational subdivisions, and so on. It was not entirely clear at that time that the OCLC standard would come to be accepted. A similar survey in 1975 was by and large descriptive of what in retrospect must be considered competing online-search ideologies with application to library research. Additionally, ARL's 1975 survey pointed up the apparently widespread perception of obstacles to efficient bibliographic retrieval of information. The analysis of computerized bibliographic searching at the University of California and the University of Pennsylvania, for example, emphasized a perceived need for an information professional (i.e., librarian) to conduct computer-assisted searching. Meanwhile, what would today be called the learning curve associated with individual computer-assisted retrieval of online information can be seen in the description of the complex instruction manuals designed to explain how to search subjects on line (Zeidner, 1976). Indeed, as late ...