Impact of On-Line Card Catalogs on End Users

The purpose of this research is to examine aspects of manner in which the library science professional community treats the issue of the impact of on-line card catalogs and other machine-readable library utilities on end users, hereafter sometimes referred to as library clients. The plan of the research will be to set forth the context in which the use of high technology by library clients has become relevant in the current period and then to discuss what appears to be an unfortunate gap in the professional community's conceptualization of the relationship between effective utilization of on-line library utilities in general and the use of such technology by clients in particular.

The impact of the Information Age on library organization and praxis would have been impossible to manage had a machine-readable version of information not been accessible via computer automation. Conventional card cataloging had long been available; however, it is one thing to have information embedded in manually operated indexing systems and another to have staff available to use such systems efficiently. Computer-assisted sorting, cross-referencing, and indexing of bibliographic material, plus the capability of instantaneous retrieval of bibliographic entries so sorted and indexed made the difference between existence and usage of the information explosion. Library-specific high technology was uniquely suited to improving access to research materials. But along with high-tech potential

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ioning a key role for reference librarians in the development and implementation of successful searches, particularly regarding specialized knowledge areas and "nonbibliographic" information. This point is also made by Horny (334). By 1986, the sheer volume of machine-readable data suitable for library cataloging had created a strongly felt need on the part of library professionals for good retrieval mechanisms. The Library of Congress had established standards for on-line cataloging, and protocols allowed machine-readable cards created by LC to be shared by other libraries on the LC system. But implementation of an on-line card catalogue and other searchable media lagged well behind the creation rate of new library materials, and the hard fact was that most libraries faced a cataloging backlog nightmare. Throughout the 1980s there was a debate between librarians favoring (1) systematic creation of universal standards meant to facilitate information sharing and consistency between and among important libraries or (2) creation of information-retrieval catalogues in a "brief cataloging" (Ross and West 334) or "minimally defined format" so that potential users would not be faced with "complete absence of information for a given it

Category: Science - I