OCLC Newsletter

              "\
)
t)
OCLC Newsletter
January/February 1991 ISSN: 0163-898X
Jl creatin~ li~rarr ~alaxies of t~e 21st centurr
No.189
OCLC Newsletter
January/Febnuuy 1991
Editor:
Philip Schieber
Assistant Editor:
Nita Dean
Correspondents:
Nancy Campbell
Tom Clareson
Jean Davis
Elinor Hashim
Kriss Jenny-Case
Erik Jul
Editorial Assistant:
Marifay Makssour
Art Direction:
Mickey Hawk
Art Production/
Desktop Publishing:
Mickey Hawk
Bobbi Rittenhouse
'IYpeseHing:
Tammy Seagle
Photos taken by Rich Skopin
unless otherwise noted.
No. 189
OCLC Newsletter(ISSN:0163-898X) is
published by OCLC Online Computer
Library Center, Incorporated, 6565
Frantz Road, Dublin, Ohio 43017-
0702. Contents of this Newsletter may
be reproduced in whole or·in part pro­vided
that credit is given. OCLC News­letter
is distributed free. Direct sub­scription
inquiries and changes of ad­dress
to: Newsletter Subscriptions,
OCLC 6565 Frantz Road, Dublin, Ohio
43017-0702.
OCLC in Dublin, Ohio, can be reached
via the following telephone numbers:
Ohio ....... ....... ... ... ....... (800) 848-8286
National .... ............ ...... (800) 848-5878
Canada ....... ... .. ... ... .. ... (800) 533-8201
Asia Pacific area ... . . . .. .. (614) 7~188
OCLC Europe in Birmingham,
United Kingdom . . . ..... . 44-21-4564656
Ill
OCLC, a non-profit membership
organization, is engaged in computer
library service and research.
CONTENTS
MEMBERSHIP NEWS
.:J New Network update.
Washington Report.
~ Dublin Chamber of Commerce honors Frederick Kilgour.
Cooperative Preservation Programs Group meets.
~ RLG and OCLC sign preservation agreement.
Nihon University is 27th OCLC member in Japan.
~ Holdings of 16 Philadelphia libraries added to database.
.-J A talk with Chinese, Japanese, Korean Cataloger, Lori Bates.
E::J CAL receives retrospective conversion grants.
.U OCLC news releases to be available via Internet.
Mary Berghaus Levering is new FLICC Executive Director . .a PRISM field-test libraries honored at reception.
RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT
IIC John Carroll calls for more science in interface design.
SPECIAL REPORT/Group Access Capability
III] OCLC's Group Access Capability promotes resource
sharing.
A profiling profile.
SoLINE is OCLC's largest GAC.
.:0 SharePAC helps Kentucky consortium improve library services.
.:tJ GAC and GAC/Union List groups.
E:] Northwest Group Access Project links libraries in the Pacific
Northwest.
California XPRS speeds up borrowing.
LSCA funding has helped libraries since 1956.
INTERVIEW
~ Joe B. Forsee, Director, Division of Public Library Services,
Georgia Department of Education.
PRODUCT NEWS
liED Field test of new reference service announced.
PNI now available on EPIC.
El Business Dateline added to EPIC service.
OCLC to convert records of the Guildhall Library, London.
IE::] Records from the National Library of Australia processed via
TAPECON service.
National Taiwan Normal University to use TECH PRO
service .
.xJ Use of tape loading grows.
Validator Software available through EPSIG.
LETTERS
lED Toward gender-neutral language.
Swedish translation error noted.
\
)
'•
FROM K. WAYNE SMITH
It's Not
Business As Usual
T his is an extraordinarily eventful time at
OCLC. While I cannot cover everything of
significance that is going on, I would like to
update the OCLC membership on our talks with
Utlas, our financial position, and our progress with
our three priorities-the New Network, the PRISM
service, and the EPIC service.
On February 14, OCLC and Thomson Canada
Limited discontinued negotiations regarding the
acquisition by OCLC of the Utlas International
Canada division of Thomson. We were unable to
reach a definitive agreement and thus, we ended
our talks, which began with our signing a letter of
intent last November. Our parting was quite arnica~
ble, and our decision to not go forward was based
largely on the technical and contractual difficulties
that would be involved in consolidating the Utlas
and OCLC systems. We will continue to explore al­ternatives
for library networking in North America
for the mutual benefit of the OCLC and Canadian
library communities. Utlas will continue as an
OCLC network.
On February 18, OCLC took the difficult but
necessary step of reducing its workforce by 4 2
positions, or some 5 percent, in response to much
lower-than-expected revenues from services to
member libraries. The current recession has
impacted libraries particularly hard and many are
experiencing severe budget cuts. Our reduced
revenues are hitting at the same time we are incur­ring
substantially increased duplicate costs, over
$3 million already this year, associated with having
to operate two networks and two online systems.
Our downsizing is in addition to stringent cost cut­ting
over the past two years that has reduced oper­ating
costs by some 10 percent. We will continue
to do everything we can to hold down costs to
OCLC member libraries without sacrificing quality
of service or vi tar programs.
At the same time we are downsizing and tighten­ing
our belt, we are also advising users that it ap­pears
likely that we will have to increase prices by
some 5 percent next year. This would be our first
price increase in three years. We had hoped to
bring you the New Network, the PRISM service,
and EPIC without having to increase prices. It was
a worthy goal, and we almost made it.
We are achieving many of our other goals, how­ever,
particularly with respect to the New Network
and the PRISM service. The first three months of
implementation for the New Network have been
demanding, aggravating, and at times, frustrating.
But, things are starting to look better. OCLC and
Sprint are getting better at running the New Net­work,
and we expect improvement as we continue
the deployment. By mid-February we had installed
1, 120 modems, or about 33 percent of the net­work.
More than 1,150 libraries have been trained
in the PRISM service, and these libraries are report­ing
back to us that they are very pleased with what
PRISM can do for them, particularly the increased
productivity it provides. On the EPIC front, we
began a field test of an end-user online reference
system February 18 at 16 sites, and we will be
watching the test very closely.
Clearly, it is not business as usual, in the world,
in the economy, in your libraries, or within OCLC.
During these trying times, cooperation, collabora­tion,
and resource sharing take on even more signif­icance
and importance-as does our new motto:
' 'Be Kind.' '
?.7; 4
K. Wayne Smith
President and Chief Executive Officer
OCLC
Status of new
telecommunications
network
by jean Davis
Deployment of OCLC's new telecommuni­cations
network is proceeding. As of mid­January,
600 modems and 1 ,800 terminals
had been switched over; during the next
12 months, we will install the remaining
2, 750 modems and switch over 9,600
terminals.
While the overall statistics for the New
Network are satisfactory, many users have
experienced extended periods of down­time
or other disruptions of service during
the early phases of their switchover from
the current to the New Network. OCLC
and Sprint are aware of the problems and
are doing everything they can to smooth
the bumps in the implementation process.
OCLC and Sprint have corrected some
major problems that were encountered the
first six weeks of the deployment, and we
believe things are going to get better as we
continue to gain experience. We have
taken the following steps to ftx problems
and improve the deployment:
• OCLC and Sprint have corrected a mal­function
in software switches at minor
node sites which disrupted service and
forced users to log-on again to resume
their work.
• OCLC and Sprint are working to correct
problems encountered in chains of
more than six terminals or with ex­tended
distance cables or line extenders.
The problems can involve I/0 boards,
on-site cabling, and other user equip­ment.
Unfortunately, each large chain
of terminals appears to be unique and re­quires
special attention. OCLC is work­ing
very closely with institutions with
large chains of terminals.
• Although OCLC has added six staff
members and four incoming WATS lines
at the OCLC User Contact Desk and Net­work
Operations Section, we know that
users are still experiencing difficulties in
getting through to OCLC. In a normal
month, the User Contact Desk handles
MEMBERSHIP NEWS
6,200 to 6,500 calls. In October, they
had 9,260 calls; 8,640 in November;
and 8,300 calls the first two weeks in
December. Length of an average pre­New
Network call was 3.1 minutes; the
average is now 5.2 minutes. We are ex­ploring
various ways to improve our
communications with users during the
installation process.
Our experience thus far has been both
painful and valuable. We are becoming bet­ter
at anticipating problems. We are identi­fying
problems faster, and we are ftxing
them faster.
What can users do to help their installa­tion
of the New Network go as smoothly as
possible? OCI.C network engineers and
User Contact Desk staff suggest the follow­ing:
• Install PASSPORT software on terminals
before the installation of the New Net­work.
Failure to do so will delay and/or
complicate New Network installation at
a user site.
• Let library staff know in advance that
NCR, Sprint, and the local phone com­pany
will be installing the New Net­work
on a particular day. Arrange to
meet the NCR representative. Be famil­iar
with the location of your modem,
lines, and other local telecommunica­tions
equipment.
• Be kind. Be patient. This is a compli­cated
process.
We at OCLC regret the inconvenience
that downtime and other aggravations dur­ing
installation of the New Network have
caused. We believe the inconvenience is
temporary and that users will be pleased
with the performance of the New Network
and appreciate its advanced capabilities.
In the meantime, we want to assure
users that we hear them, we sympathize
with them, and we understand their
frustrations. We at OCLC and Sprint are
doing everything we can can, as fast as we
can, and as well as we can, to get users up
and running on the New Network-Jean
Davis is Director, OCLC Corporate Prod­uct
Services Division.
4 OCLC Newsletter January/February 1991
Washington Report
by Elinor Hashim
In the last issue of the Newsletter, Ire­ported
that federal library programs had
survived the budget process with modest
increases for fiscal1991. Many librarians,
however, have expressed concern that the
ever-increasing deficit, the Persian Gulf
war, and the savings and loan bailout pose
threats to these funds.
President Nixon in the 1970s, and Presi­dent
Reagan in the early 1980s, tried to im­pound
funds that had been appropriated
by Congress. In both cases, they were un­successful
as the courts found (in President
Nixon's case) that the withholding of con­gressionally
appropriated funds by the ex­ecutive
branch was illegal. The massive
reconciliation bill (HR. 5835) which was en­acted
in the fmal days of the 10 1st Con­gress
to implement the budget agreement,
however, includes caps on discretionary
spending in three categories-defense, in­ternational,
and domestic-up until fiscal
1995. This measure, signed into law by
President Bush, is aimed not at the deftcit,
but at spending. If the deftcit rises for vari­ous
reasons, no penalty is imposed, but the
spending caps will be enforced by auto­matic
sequesters. This law also shifts
power from the legislative to the executive
branch, as the spending caps can be ad­justed
from year to year by the President.
There is a more complete explanation
of the budget agreement in the Dec. 31,
1990, issue of the ALA Washington
Newsletter.
While nothing is certain at this point, it
appears that the caps on domestic discre­tionary
spending (federal funding for librar­ies)
could have an effect in the future.
There have been some changes in com­mittee
assignments as a result of the No­vember
elections and reorganization in
both Houses of Congress. Of particular in­terest
to librarians: Rep. William Ford
(D-MI) is the new Chairman of the House
Education and Labor Committee; Rep. Ford
will also chair the Postsecondary Education
Committee, which will hold hearings on
the Higher Education Act (HEA); Rep.
Charles Rose (D-NC) succeeds Rep. Frank
\
MEMBERSHIP NEWS
Dublin Chamber of Commerce honors
Frederick G. Kilgour
Frederick G. Kilgour, founder of OCLC,
received the Man of the lf?ar Award from
the Dublin Chamber of Commerce on
December 18 at the Chamber's 1990 Rec­ognition
Luncheon.
The award is given annually to a per­son
whose accomplishments have given
Dublin, Ohio, national attention, according
to Chamber Director Margery Amorose.
Past honorees include golfer Jack
Nicklaus, auto racer Bobby Rahal, and
Wendy's Restaurant founder Dave Thomas.
IJ1
!l',ll;;;a Jl .....
~·1'\"-'•
--~ ~(,~ . ' ·' •~ j_~.~- \ .
...,...- .;~--. ~
fii!,J . l -
Dr. K. Wayne Smith, President and
Chief Executive Officer of OCLC, was the
featured speaker at the luncheon. He
spoke about Mr. Kilgour and OCLC, calling
the latter the ''lengthened shadow'' of the
former. ' 'This is a proud moment for those
of us at OCLC, and for those of us who
know Fred," he said.
Dt: Smith stated: • • Fred Kilgour is a • Frederick Kilgour speaking at the
historian who looks to the future. He is an Dublin Chamber of Commerce 1990
Recognition Luncheon
entrepreneur who knows how to manage,
a dreamer who knows how to get things done. In staff meetings he would apply
Aristotle's theory of memory to contemporary problems involving computer memory.
He was an executive who ran a large organization and still found time to write schol­arly
treatises on the history of science and medicine. ' '
Jan Rozanski, Mayor of Dublin, called OCLC ''a very good neighbor.''
Frederick G. Kilgour and his wife, Eleano~; reside in Chapel Hill, North Carolina,
where he is Distinguished Professoi; School of Information and library Science, The
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Mr. Kilgour was Executive Director and President ofOCLC from 1967 to 1980. He
oversaw the growth of OCLC (then called the Ohio College Library Center) from an in­trastate
network of 54 Ohio college and university libraries to an international net­work
that today serves more than 11,000 institutions. He serves on the OCLC Board
of 1hlstees as Founder 'Ihlstee.
Annunzio (D-IL) as chairman of the House
Administration Committee; the Joint Com­mittee
on the Library (overseeing the
library of Congress) will be chaired by Sen.
Claiborne Pell (D-RI) with Rep. Charles
Rose (D-NC) as Vice-Chairman; and the
Joint Committee on Printing (overseeing
the Government Printing Office) will be
chaired by Rep. Rose with Sen. Wendell
Ford (D-KY) as Vice-Chairman.
At this time, it appears that there will
be at least three major pieces of legisla-tion
of particular interest to the library
community in the 102ndCongress: Rein­troduction
of Sen. Gore's High-Perfor­manceComputerTechnology
Act of 1990,
known as NREN; reauthorization of the
Higher Education Act (HEA ); and
reauthorizationofthePaperworkReduc­tionAct.
AhearingonHEA will probably
be held by Rep. Ford on Legislative Day,
April16,1991.-Elinor Hashim is OCLC
Government Relations Officer.
Cooperative
Preservation
Programs Group
tackles issues at
Washington meeting
by Tom Clareson
The sixth annual meeting of the Coopera­tive
Preservation Programs Group was
held in Washington, D.C., Dec. 6-7, 1990.
Nearly 50 people attended the meeting, in­cluding
representatives from OCLC and
PRLC.
The Cooperative Preservation Programs
Group is a loosely organized body of
library and archives preservation profes­sionals
involved in cooperative preserva­tion
activities at a state, regional, or
national level. Those who attend the an­nual
meetings of the group are responsible
for and engaged in statewide preservation
planning, or the dissemination of preserva­tion
services, education, and information
to large and diverse constituencies, or both.
The group was formed in 1984 when
Ann Russell, Executive Director of the
Northeast Document Conservation Center,
received a grant from the National Endow­ment
for the Humanities (NEH) to bring to­gether
a dozen leaders in cooperative
preservation programming to discuss pres­ervation
issues and to devise useful ap­proaches
for addressing and solving
common problems. Various institutions
and organizations involved in preservation
activity nationwide are invited to the
group's annual meeting.
The Cooperative Preservation Programs
Group meeting is one of the best barome­ters
available on preservation activities in
the states, including issues relating to fund­ing,
legislation, training, and cooperation.
The first day of the 1990 meeting was de­voted
to two program sessions, one on
statewide preservation planning and devel­opment,
the other on achieving legislative
support and action for preservation. Day
two included a publications exchange be­tween
the meeting participants and discus­sion
groups on specific topics.
OCLC Newsletter January/February 1991 5
Lisa Fox, Preservation Program Devel­opment
Officer at the Southeastern Library
Network (SOLINET), served as moderator
for the program on Statewide Preservation
Planning and Development. The first pre­sentation
focused on the role of the Na­tional
Endowment for the Humanities in
statewide preservation planning. George
Farr, Director of the Office of Preservation
at NEH, discussed the type of information
NEH is asking for in proposals for state­wide
preservation planning projects. Ac­cording
to Dr. Farr, Statewide Preservation
Planning is a new category among NEH
preservation grants, with no fixed model
and few precedents. Dr. Farr noted that ad­ministrative
and institutional configura­tions
vary from state to state, so the
guidelines for this type of grant need to be
flexible.
Harlan Greene and Gregor Trinkaus-Ran­dall,
who are involved with NEH Office of
Preservation grants in North Carolina and
Massachusetts, discussed the aspects of
managing a statewide preservation plan­ning
project. Mr. Greene, of the North Car­olina
Preservation Consortium, outlined
the North Carolina Statewide Preservation
Planning Project. The Consortium is an in­dependent
body, which was started as a di­rect
result of the March 1989 National
Conference on Statewide Preservation
Planning. During 1990, the Consortium
made a direct approach to the librarians
and archivists of North Carolina through
local forums to ask what they wanted in
the way of preservation services.
Mr. 11inkaus-Randall, representing the
Massachusetts Board of Library Commis­sioners,
noted that his state recognized the
preservation problem and started work on
it before they received NEH funding. He
spoke of efforts in 1988-89 to raise conscious­ness
around the state about preservation
through a series of town meetings with li­brarians,
town clerks, and historical society
representatives, a number of workshops,
and presentations to the library school at
Sinuuons College. In 1989-90, Mr.
11inkaus-Randall administered a Preserva­tion
Needs Assessment Survey, and is now
confirming the results of the survey by
making some site visits, leading to the de­velopment
of a State Preservation Action
MEMBERSHIP NEWS
Plan, which will be presented at another se­ries
of town meetings.
Preservation Consultant Margaret Child,
who is working with the Regional OCI.C
Network Directors Advisory Committee
(RONDAC) to identify and develop models
to address OCLC member institutions' pres­ervation
needs, talked about preparing a
state action agenda for preservation. She
told statewide program representatives
that they need to think of the planning and
development of a statewide program as a
continuum. She urged states to go into the
planning process with an outline of their
plan up front, and to expect planning to
move into action. She also suggested that
preservation planners contact people in
their state who have the power to provide
money and political support.
Dr. Child listed the most useful by-prod­ucts
of NEH funding, including, strength­ening
cross-professional ties (libraries,
archives, and historical societies); using
statewide planning meetings and surveys
to begin education about the key areas of
preservation efforts needed; getting an in­terested
group of' 'custodians'' in the state
to start ''worrying about the problem;''
and using surveys to provide data relevant
to your state. Dr. Child suggested that
there are two sides to each state project­needs
which can be addressed quickly, pro­viding
immediate feedback/gratification for
participants, and also long-term project de­velopment,
because it sometimes takes a
number of years to bring about massive
change.
Dr. Child suggested that each state have
two levels of progrants. One is the public­health
level-bringing knowledge of pres­e.
rvation to the library and arcltival
community so that they act with preserva­tion
implications in mind and provide
proper care, handling, and basic storage of
materials. The other level is actively inter­vening
to preserve important collections­through
conservation, microftlming, and
other efforts, including decision-making on
which collections are important.
John Townsend of the New York State
Library said that sustaining a preservation
infrastructure of ongoing programs is key.
He believes that legislators seldom support
preservation because they are excited
about it, they do so because their constitu-
6 OCLC Newsletter January/February 1991
ents tell them to. He told statewide project
representatives to convince legislators to
support preservation initiatives that build
upon brittle books efforts.
Sharon Bennett, representing the Pal­metto
Archives, Libraries, and Museums
Council on Preservation, South Carolina's
statewide preservation organization, sug­gested
that statewide planners need to fos­ter
cooperation. This can sometimes
reduce the air of competition in preserva­tion
efforts in the states. She also noted
that South Carolina had published a report
in January 1989 as a result of their planning
process, and had carried out actions de­scribed
in the report. These included a
statewide Preservation Awareness Day, hav­ing
SOLINET give institutional needs assess­ments,
and offering preservation-related
workshops.
The Thursday afternoon discussion ses­sion,
''Achieving legislative Support and
Action for Preservation,'' was moderated
by Merrily Smith of the library of Con­gress.
Presentations included ''legislative
Strategies: Conceiving, Drafting, and Pass­ing
legislation'' by legislative Consultant
Robert Frase, and' 'Acquiring legislative
Support,'' by Lawrence Reger of the Na­tional
Institute for Conservation of Cultural
Property. Lynne Newell of the Connecticut
State Library spoke about her institution's
series of legislative successes in preserva­tion,
including bills supporting Preserva­tion
of the State's Historical Record,
Investigation of the Use of Alkaline Paper
for State Publications of Lasting Value (Per­manent
Records), and a pending bill on
Adoption of Alkaline Paper for State Publi­cations
of Lasting Value. The basis of this
legislative action was a task force of individ­uals
from various professional back­grounds,
including business, who raised
awareness and increased legislative recogni­tion
of the problem.
Katherine Walter, Chair of the Nebraska
Document Preservation Advisory Council
(NDPAC), said her organization is a diverse
group of agencies and organizations in Ne­braska
which are interested in preserva­tion.
(NEBASE, the OCI.C regional
network for Nebraska, is included among
the members ofNDPAC.) NDPAC has led
reactive efforts on recycling bills affecting
preservation, based on the concern that
many recycled papers do not meet the stan­dards
for permanence and durability, and
the group has mounted proactive efforts
on alkaline paper legislation. NDPAC's leg­islative
efforts also include giving senators
information and support on preservation­related
issues and getting sponsors for bills.
The legislative session ended with a
panel discussion on lobbying. Meeting at­tendees
then adjourned to the office of the
Commission on Preservation and Access
for a reception hosted by Commission staff.
The topics for discussion during the sec­ond
day of the meeting included consider­ation
of several questions: is cooperative
buying of eq·uipment, supplies, and ser­vices
feasible; how can the effectiveness of
information dissemination be improved;
how can the need for basic repair work­shops
be met; is fmancial self-sufficiency in
the pricing and marketing of preservation
services realistic; can referral service be ob­jective;
and, how can state, regional, and
national preservation programs work to­gether?
During the discussion sessions, a
great deal of information was shared by
participants. However, the complexity of
these issues assured that such topics will
continue to be discussed in future meet­ings,
including the group's December 1991
meeting.
One key concept of the day's discussion
sessions was that preservation conscious­ness-
raising, awareness-building, and
planning need to include all possible con­stituencies,
including all types of libraries,
archives, historical societies, records-man­agement
organizations, conservation cen­ters,
library schools, museums, and town
clerks. Attendees at the Cooperative Pres­ervation
Programs Group meeting are
doing many things to reach these diverse
groups, and the number and types of orga­nizations
which attended the December
meeting reflect that preservation issues are
beginning to be discussed in a wide variety
of forums.- Tom Clareson is OCI.C
Membership and Cooperative Programs
Administrator.
MEMBERSHIP NEWS
RLG and OCLC sign
preservation
agreement
The Research Libraries Group (RLG) and
OCLC have entered into a cooperative
agreement that encourages increased par­ticipation
in RLG's Preservation Program.
Under the two-year agreement, OCLC will
subsidize program fees for eligible OCLC­member
institutions that are not already af­filiated
with RLG's Preservation Program.
''This cooperative arrangement will
help serve the special preservation needs of
research libraries in OCLC,'' said Dr. K.
Wayne Smith, President and Chief Execu­tive
Officer, OCLC. ''It will help
strengthen RLG's important preservation
efforts and will avoid costly duplication of
services. It will supplement OCLC's and
RLG's ongoing cooperative efforts in stan­dards,
computer linking, and exchange of
preservation data.' '
Mr. James Michalko, President of RLG,
said: ''RLG's Preservation Program has de­livered
significant benefit to the nation and
to individual research libraries. The strug­gle
to ensure that access to these important
resources is not curtailed by the enormous
threats to their condition is best engaged in
cooperatively. This agreement enables
more institutions to join with their col­leagues
around the country in an array of
activities and grant-funded projects to sup­port
preservation.''
The RLG Preservation Program has op­erated
since 1974. Initially it focused on
developing model projects for large-scale
preservation microfLI.ming efforts. In re­cent
years, program participants have ex­tended
their efforts beyond reformatting
projects and jointly undertaken initiatives
to systematically assess local preservation
needs, train staff, establish or expand ef­forts
to physically treat large numbers of
deteriorating materials, and apply new
technology to preservation problems.
OCLC and RLG have long shared a com­mitment
to making information available
about materials that have been preserved
on microftlm. To date, they have ex­changed
nearly 500,000 bibliographic re­cords
for ftlmed items entered in OCLC's
Online Union Catalog and RLG's Research
Libraries Information Network (RUN).
The Research Libraries Group, Inc.
(RLG) is a not-for-profit enterprise of major
U.S. universities and research institutions
that act jointly to improve access to infor­mation
needed in education and scholar­ship.
RUN is RLG's computer system; it
serves information access and management
needs of the corporation's members, non­member
libraries of all types, and individ­ual
researchers.
Nlhon University
becomes 27th
Japanese OCLC
member
Nihon University, Japan's largest private
university, recently became the 27th OCLC
member in Japan through arrangements
made by Kinokuniya Company Ltd.,
OCLC's representative in Japan since 1986.
• Andrew Wang, Director, OCLC Asia Pacific
and Technical Services Division, (left), and
Hisako Kotaka, OCLC CJK350 Services Sec­tion
Manager, are behind the lectern at an
information seminar In Tokyo, Japan.
' 'Japan seeks information from Western
countries in Western languages,' ' said
Masashi Thkai, General Manager, Biblio­graphic
Data Services Department,
Kinokuniya Company Ltd. ''OCLC and
Kinokuniya are privileged to be able to pro­vide
this information to Japan, its students,
and its citizens.' '
OCLC Newsletter January/February 1991 7
According to Phyllis Bova Spies, Vice
President, OCLC International and Conver­sion
Services, the OCLC database will be en­riched
as a result of Nihon University's
decision to become an OCLC member.
''Some Nihon University affiliates' holdings
are currently being added to the database
through a multi-phased retrospective con­version
project,' ' she said. ''After commu­nications
and access arrangements are
completed, the associated libraries will cat­alog
online.' '
Nihon University is a private coeduca­tional
university with a student enrollment
of more than 82,000. It was founded as
Nihon Law School in 1889, and its facilities
and campuses are now located throughout
Japan with its central administrative offices
located in Chiyoda Ward, Tokyo. Nihon
University has faculties of law, humanities
and sciences, economics, commerce, art, in­ternational
relations, science and technol­ogy,
industrial technology, engineering,
medicine, dentistry, agriculture and veteri­nary
science, and pharmacy.
University affiliates include: a corre­spondence
division; a two-year junior col­lege;
21 research institutes including the
Atomic Research Energy Institute, the
Shimoda Institute of Marine Research, the
Human Science Laboratory, the Law Insti­tute,
the Economic Science Research Insti­tute,
Judicial Institute, and the Research
Institute of Agriculture and Veterinary
Medicine; 11 senior high schools; three ju­nior
high schools; and one kindergarten.
' 'The Japanese place great emphasis on
lifelong learning, and Japanese libraries are
increasing their collections to encourage
this learning effort,' ' said Ms. Spies. ' 'As a
result, Japanese libraries are looking to­ward
library automation. That's where
OCLC fits in.''
OCLC and Kinokuniya recently spon­sored
user conferences and information
seminars in Osaka and Tokyo, Japan. Fifty
people representing 27 institutions at­tended
the user conferences, and 150 peo­ple
attended the seminars, which were
open to both OCLC users and nonusers.
MEMBERSHIP NEWS
Holdings of 16
Philadelphia-area
libraries to be added
to OCLC database
The Pew Charitable Trusts have awarded a
S2.77 million grant to improve access to
holdings of rare books, manuscripts, ar­chives,
fllms, photographs, and drawings in
16 Philadelphia-area research libraries. The
five-year project-Initiative for the 1990s­is
being coordinated by the Philadelphia
Area Consortium of Special Collections
Libraries.
The 16libraries will use the OCLC and
Research Libraries Information Network
{RUN) databases to catalog some 250,000
items online. Six PALINET/OCLC members
will catalog on the OCLC system, and 10
on the RUN system. The OCLC libraries
will tapeload their records for RUN librar­ies
and vice versa.
The Pew grant and S 1. 38 million in
matching funds from private, public, and in­stitutional
sources,
will underwrite staff
and automation equip­ment
expenses in the
first three years of the
project.
The Consortium was founded in 1985
to ensure that Philadelphia's library collec­tions
continue to be preserved, supported,
appreciated, and utilized. Libraries partici­pating
in the project collectively hold an
estimated 2.5 million printed volumes; 50
million manuscripts; and 20 million histori­cal
photographs, prints, maps, drawings,
and works of art. Consortium libraries in­clude:
the Academy of Natural Sciences,
American Philosophical Society, Annenberg
Research Institute, Athenaeum of Philadel­phia,
College of Physicians of Philadelphia,
Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Library
Company of Philadelphia, Presbyterian His­torical
Association, Rosenbach Museum &
Library, Ryan Memorial Library of St. Charles
Borromeo Seminary, and the rare books and
special collections departments of Bryn
Mawr College Library, Free Library of Phila­delphia,
Haverford College Library,
Swarthmore College Libraries, 1bnple Uni­versity
Libraries, and University of Pennsyl­vania
Libraries.
' 'At the Trusts, we
see this project not
only as a significant
opportunity to in­crease
awareness of
and access to the
riches of Philadelphia
libraries, but also as a
model for inter-institu­tional
cooperation,' '
said Marian A. God­frey,
Program Direc­tor
for Culture at the
Pew Charitable 'frusts.
''Thinking collec­tively,
instead of com­petitively,
these
institutions are able to
approach challenges
of developing and pre­serving
collections
more efficiently. ' '
• Members of the Consortium Executive Committee are coordinat­ing
plans for the project. They are, left to right: Thomas Horrocks,
College of Physicians of Philadelphia; Ellen S. Dunlap, Rosenbach
Museum & Library; Roger W. Moss, Athenaeum of Philadelphia;
Carol M. Spawn, Academy of Natural Sciences; and Mark Frazier
Lloyd, University of Pennsylvania Archives.
8 OCLC Newsletter January/February 1991
Ignore stereotypes
advises Lori Bates
by Kriss jenny-Case
Editor's Note: Lori Bates has been a
Chinese japanese Korean (C]K) Online
Cataloging Assistant in the C]K350 sec­tion
of OCLC's Asia Pacific and Technical
Services Division since October 1989. She
holds a bachelor's degree in German from
Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, and a
master's degree in japanese from the
University of Hawaii. She also has stud­ied
both modern and classical Chinese.
Ms. Bates also is deaf-the result of an
illness when she was 14 years old.
Here is a brief conversation, in which
she talks about her work, the japanese
culture, and her views about deafness.
Newsletter: Why did you decide to
major in a language when you went to
Miami University?
Bates: I've always liked languages. I re­ceived
a degree in German from Miami Uni­versity
because they didn't offer a degree in
Japanese. I found that learning the German
language was rather easy for me-l wanted
more of a challenge, and I had been inter­ested
in Japan since I was in high school.
So when I went to college, I decided I
would study Japanese to see if I could have
any success with it and would enjoy it.
Learning Japanese was always challeng­ing,
and sometimes frustrating or exhaust­ing,
but it was neve.r boring. After I wrote
my master's thesis, I was exhausted. All I
wanted to do was to eat, sleep, and watch
TV for a couple of weeks-and take a vaca­tion
from Japanese.
Newsletter: By the time you started
learning foreign languages, though, you
were deaf. Did this present problems for
you?
Bates: I became deaf when I was 14,
and I started learning Japanese when I was
19. I began to teach myself how to speak
Japanese, but really concentrated on get­ting
a reading knowledge of the language
and translating it to English. My work at
MEMBERSHIP NEWS
• Hisako Kotaka, left, and Lori Bates are pictured in Ms. Bates' office at OCLC.
OCLC involves transliterating and some­times
translating information or data in one
written form (printed or hand-written
cards) to another (online vernacular data in
Japanese records), so deafness is not a prob­lem
there.
Newsletter: Do you ever sit back and
say, ''Wow, I've overcome these incredible
odds and am doing something that few
hearing-impaired people would ever
dream of?"
Bates: I don't think what I've done is
unusual at all. I'm doing what I'm capable
of doing. It's just that my job is somewhat
out of the ordinary for a deaf person.
Sometimes I think people use only about
50 to 75 percent of their abilities. Deafness
makes you more aware of the abilities you
have and teaches you not to waste them. I
never thought learning a foreign language
while being deaf was any big deal.
Newsletter: Have you traveled to Japan?
Bates: Yes, I've taken several trips.
Once, for three days in 1975 as a side trip
during my Miami University study tour of
1hlwan to learn Chinese; another time in
1978 on a University ofHawali study tour;
and again in 1984. In 1985, I stayed with
friends in Sapporo for five months and
tried to gain an everyday knowledge of Jap­anese
and the Japanese culture. I liked
Sapporo; it looked a lot like WISConsin,
where my parents both originally came
from, with lots of dairy farms.
Newsletter: Did you fmd the Japanese
culture very different from ours?
Bates: Most of the Japanese culture
seemed Westernized, but I noticed that
things were scaled down. For instance,
when I was in Sapporo we lived in a small
apartment that had two bedrooms and an
all-purpose room, with a refrigerator that
was similar in size to what you'd fmd in a
dormitory here.
OCLC Newsletter January/February 1991 9
Newsletter: What have your experi­ences
helped you to bring to OCLC?
Bates: My experiences have given me an
- awareness of Japan that eliminates the ro­mantic,
exotic view of Japan as being only
tea ceremonies and cherry blossoms. I
hope I have become more able to see the
Japanese point of view, rather than the dif­ferences
between the Japanese and Ameri­can
cultures, and I can focus more on
OCLC's business relationship with Japan.
Newsletter: What do you like best
about your job?
Bates: I like working with the Japanese
keyboard on the OCLC C)K system and
producing records. Searching for matching
records already in the database is OK, but
typing vernacular information for records
is the most fun. I like to see how fast I can
go without making mistakes.
Newsletter: What's the most difficult as­pect
of your job?
Bates: At flrst, one of the most difficult
aspects was working with computers. It
was very confusing for me as I had taken
only one introductory course in FORTRAN
in 1981. But it isn't so confusing now.
In my job with the C)K350 section,
there are certain subject areas, such as Chi­nese
philosophy, that I ftnd difficult. I had
to look up Chinese philosophers' names,
put them into a Romanized Japanese style
for pronunciation, and then make the ac­tual
record. For example, ''Confucius'' in
Chinese is Kung-tzu; in RomanizedJapan­ese,
it's Koshi.
For one of the most difficult records I
was dealing with, about 18th and 19th cen­tury
Japanese neo-Confucian philosophers,
my supervisor, Hisako Kotaka, had to go to
The Ohio State University's main library
and look up the names of the more obscure
philosophers in a Japanese encyclopedia.
We also had the same problems with
some records I did recently on Buddhism­how
to pronounce the names of obscure
Chinese, Japanese, and Korean monks or
priests who were somehow involved in
Japanese Buddhism between about 600
and 1700 A.D. And sometimes we needed
to fmd the names of Indian Buddhist
MEMBERSHIP NEWS
philosophers and Sanskrit sutras.
News~etter: You seem to really like
your job. Have you found it very difficult
to flt in with the rest of the employees here
at OCLC?
Bates: Not at all. We just accept each
other for who we are, and we concentrate
on what we can do rather than what we
can't. Hisako has been great. I don't think
that I could fmd any better boss. It seems
that both of us are idealistic, and we look at
the positive side of things rather than the
negative.
Newsletter: Did you have any experi­ence
working in a library before you came
to OCLC?
Bates: No work experience, but I did
take one course on basic library research
methods, and one Japanese bibliography
course as part of my graduate study. So
learning about OCLC and how to catalog
books was a bit confusing. There's so
much to learn.
Newsletter: What message would you
pass on to other hearing-impaired or deaf
people?
Bates: I would say, Don't listen to what
people say you should and shouldn't be
doing. Don't let other people judge you,
decide for you, or put limits on you. Use
what abilities you have.
For instance, some people didn't want
me to study languages at all. They thought
I should study science, so I could do rou­tine
work in a lab, regardless of whether I
wanted to.
The basic thing is not to be held back by
stereotypes. Each person is an individual,
I don't like to be considered a handicapped
person, as though there's something
wrong with my whole person. There's just
something wrong with my ears, not with
the rest of me. In fact, sometimes on appli­cations
I forget to check the ''handi­capped''
box. Let's be realistic, I probably
couldn't be an opera singer or a musician,
but I do what I can do.
10 OCLC Newsletter January/February 1991
CRL receives grants
to convert records
The Center for Research Libraries (CRL)
received a S95,000 grant from the National
Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Divi­sion
of Research Programs, Reference Materi­als/
Access and a S241 ,000 grant from the U.S.
Department of Education, Higher Education
Act Title ll-C for projects to convert mono­graph
records into machine-readable form.
The grant from NEH will be used to con­vert,
through OCLC's RETROCON service,
more than 26,000 records of materials held
in microform, including the Cooperative
Africana Microform Project, the South
Asian Microform Project, and analytics
from commercially produced sets that are
rarely held in North American libraries.
The Title II-C project involves approxi­mately
19,000 records of monographs in
Cyrillic alphabet in the Center's collection.
These are publications of the Academy of
Sciences of the USSR in the humanities, so­cial
sciences, and science published from
the Academy's founding in 1723 to about
1970. Project staff will Romanize the bib­liographic
information before adding the
records to the OCLC database.
The projects, which are being directed
by Marjorie Bloss, CRL's Director of Techni­cal
Services, will bring the Center closer to
complete conversion to machine-readable
form of the 330,000 records in its card cat­alog.
CRL has cataloged on the OCLC sys­tem
since 1981, and has been working on
conversion since 1982, adding its records
to OCLC and tapeloading into the Research
Libraries Group's Research Libraries Infor­mation
Network (RUN). Approximately
70 percent of the records have been con­verted
and added to the OCLC and RUN
databases.
The Center for Research Libraries,
founded in 1949 in Chicago Ill., is the old­est
cooperative, membership-based re­search
library in the U.S. Its mission is to
make available to the scholarly community
research materials that are rarely held in
North American libraries. The Center ac­quires,
preserves, provides bibliographic
access to, and lends from its collections of
more than 3.6 million volumes and 1.1
million units of microform.
Internet to provide
OCLCnews
The OCLC Public Relations Office is explor­ing
the possibility of making OCLC news
releases available on the Internet. If you
have Internet access and would like to be
added to the Internet news release distribu­tion
list, please send your Internet address
by mail to: OCLC, PR MC204, 6565 Frantz
Road, Dublin, Ohio, 43017, or via Internet
to mfm@rsch.oclc.org.
Mary Berghaus
Levering appointed
Executive
Director of FLICC
Mary Berghaus
Levering was re­cently
named Exec­utive
Director of
the Federal Library
and Information
Center Committee
(FLICC) after serv­ing
as acting Execu­tive
Director for 20
months.
Miraculous
Happenings
• Sherry Gordon, ILL Assistant at Hum­boldt
State University Library In Arcata,
Calif., sent this photo of an angel at work
at the OCLC terminal. • 'We have a tradi·
tlon that staff members can work In cos­tumes
on Halloween, •' said Ms. Gordon.
• 'Some of us sneak In with costumes and
some of us don't. • • Student Assistant Ana
Tarango, who was planning to attend a
costume party that evening, was an angel
at work that day, too.
MEMBERSHIP NEWS
As acting Director, she led the restruc­turing
of the FED LINK (Federal Library and
Information Network) program. She
worked to build alliances within the
Library of Congress and enlisted the coop­eration
<?f FLICC/FEDLINK members to up­date
and streamline the FED LINK fiscal
system.
Ms. Levering said she believes in collec­tive
effort and in the value of developing
cooperative relationships. ''My entire pro­fessional
life has focused on networking
and cooperative programs, bringing people
and institutions together to share informa­tion
and resources,' ' she said. ''More can
be accomplished by working together in
collaboration than ever can be accom­plished
alone."
A lawyer as well as a librarian, Ms.
Levering is a graduate of the University of
Portland, the University of Washington
Graduate School of Library and Informa­tion
Sciences, and the Georgetown Univer­sity
Law Center.
She has worked at the Library of Con­gress
(LC) since 1966 when she joined the
staff as a Special Recruit in the Program for
Outstanding Library School Graduates.
From 1967 to 1974, she worked in the Of­fice
of Director for Acquisitions and Over­seas
Operations, Processing Department,
where she helped to plan and administer
an LC acquisitions and cataloging program.
From 1975 to 1978, she was Assistant
Coordinator of Review for LC's Congres­sional
Research Service. She then served as
Assistant Chief and then Chief of the Net­work
Development Office, National
Library Service for the Blind and Physically
Handicapped for 10 years. During this pe­riod
she also coordinated the first FLICC
Forum of Federal Information Policies.
Ms. Levering has served on and chaired
several committees of the American
Library Association (ALA) and the ALA
Association of Specialized and Cooperative
Library Agencies (ASCLA). She was a mem­ber
of the ALA/ASCLA Board of Directors
from 1984 to 1986.
She is also a member of the District of
Columbia Bar and the Supreme Court Bar.
She is active in the D.C. Women's Bar Asso­ciation
and is a council member on the gov­erning
board of the Federal Bar Association's
Capitol Hill Chapter.
FLICC was created in 1965 by the
Library of Congress and the Bureau of the
Budget (now the Office of Management
and Budget) to achieve better utilization of
federal library and information center re­sources
and facilities. Its FED LINK compo­nent,
established in 1978, is an OCLC
affiliated network.
OCLC Newsletter January/February 1991 11
Librarians honored at
ALA reception for
contributions to
PRISM
Oxford Advisory Committee members and
the 19 PRISM field-test libraries were hon­ored
at a reception on Sunday, January 13
at the American Library Association Mid­winter
meeting in Chicago.
K. Wayne Smith, OCLC President and
Chief Executive Officer, thanked the recep­tion
attendees for their recommendations,
which have made PRISM a better system.
He said he also appreciates the confidence
many of the libraries expressed in OCLC by
switching over entirely to the PRISM ser­vice
before the field test was over.
Plaques saluting the staff and administra­tion
of each of the participating libraries
were presented by Dr. Smith and Edward
G. Holley, Chairman of the OCLC Board of
Trustees.
Rrst row (seated, left to right): Georgia
Brown, Manager, OCLC Core Services De-
MEMBERSHIP NEWS
velopment Department; Jane Marshall,
Head of Cataloging, Hamilton College
Library; Teresa Strozik, Director of Tech­nical
Services, Hamilton College Library;
Elizabeth Nichols, Library Division Man­ager,
Technical Services, Stockton/San Joa­quin
County Public Library; Leslie
Manning, Librarian, University of Colo­rado
at Colorado Springs Library; and
Olivia Madison, Head of Cataloging De­partment,
Iowa State University Library.
Second row: Lucille Rosa, Head of
Technical Services, U.S. Naval College;
Barbara Markuson, Executive Director,
Indiana Cooperative Library Services Au­thority
(INCOLSA); Tom Sanville, OCLC
Vice President, Marketing; Liz Bishoff, Di­rector,
OCLC Online Union Catalog Prod­uct
Management Division; Michael Fox,
Head of Processing, Division oflibrary and
Archives, Minnesota Historical Society; K.
Wayne Smith, OCLC President and Chief
Executive Officer; Carol Miller, Training
Librarian, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Library; Edward G. Holley, Chairman,
OCLC Board of 'frustees and William Rand
Kennan Jr. Professor at the School oflnfor-
12 OCLC Newsletter January/February 1991
mation and Library Science, The University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Nancy
Davey, Processing Center Manager, IN­COLSA;
Nancy Eaton, Director, Iowa
State University Library; V. louise Saylor,
Acting Director, Eastern Washington Uni­versity
Library; and Martha Hruska, Act­ing
Assistant Director for Technical
Services, University of Florida Libraries.
Third row: Glenn Patton, OCLC Con­sulting
Product Support Specialist; Don
Muccino, OCLC Vice President, Research
and Development; Bill Carney, OCLC Ac­cess
Support Specialist; Gary Houk, Direc­tor,
OCLC Technical Services Development
Division; Sam Byrd, Head, Monograph
Copy-based Cataloging Section, Massachu­setts
Institute of Technology Libraries;
David Gleim, Head of Monographic Cata­loging,
The University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill Library; Marilyn Boria, Direc­tor,
Elmhurst (Ill.) Public Library; Dot
Hope, Acting Chair of Catalog Depart­ment,
University of Florida Libraries; and
Jean Davis, Director, OCLC Corporate
Product Services Division.
'
\
.../
• lWenty-six international guests visited
OCLC on December 21 as part of the Inter­national
Visitors Council Mid-Winter Semi­nar,
entitled • 'Information Systems for
Technology Transfer.'' The visitors, all
information specialists, came from
Antigua, Botswana, Colombia, Honduras,
Indonesia, Kenya, Montserrat, Morocco,
Nepal, Pakistan, S8o Tome, St. Kitts,
St. Vincent, Taiwan, Tanzania, Yemen, and
Zaire. For more information on tours, or
to schedule a tour of OCLC, call Nancy
Campbell, Tour Coordinator, at (800) 848·
5878 (U.S.), (800) 848·8286 (Ohio), (800)
533-8201 (Canada), or (614) 764-6000 .•
MEMBERSHIP NEWS
OCLC Newsletter January/February 1991 13
RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT
Researcher calls for
more science, less
art, in designing
human/computer
interfaces
byErik]ul
IBM researcher John M. Carroll wants to
make system development more scientific
than it is now and to increase the role of
psychology in designing human/computer
interfaces.
Dr. Carroll, who is Manager of User
Interface Theory and Design at the IBM
Watson Research Center in Yorktown
Heights, N.Y., spoke at OCLC on Nov. 12,
1990, as part of the OCLC Distinguished
Seminar Series.
' 'The best development comes from a
mystical approach,'' he said. ' 'The least
productive, from the scientific.' '
For example, low-level keystroke analy­ses
and time-and-motion studies are insuffi­cient
and do not reveal much about users'
higher-level cognitive activities. In the ab­sence
of useful scientific data, design meth­odologies
tend to rely more upon intuition
and tacit knowledge.
Unfortunately, developers cannot articu­late
their design methodologies when they
employ the mystical approach to their de­sign
of human/computer interactions
(HCI). This leads, according to Dr. Carroll,
to the design of systems that are not as use­ful
or usable as they could be.
Dr. Carroll proposed that HCI design
methodology should focus on the psychol­ogy
to be found within technological arti­facts
and try to slightly improve what is
already being done through deliberated
• John Carroll
evolution. This methodology, while con­servative,
is inductive and eclectic.
Dr. Carroll referred to Sir Francis
Bacon's ' 'natural history of trades' ' as a par­adigm
for his approach. Bacon's ideas
were based on observation and an under­standing
of ' 'how crafts get crafted. ' ' Dr.
Carroll suggested that modern system de­signers
should keenly observe and under­stand
the tasks users perform before
attempting to improve the procedures.
Even then, the goal should be to make
small, incremental changes.
The design methodology, said Dr: Carroll,
should take into account where we have
been. He noted that ' 'even those who do not
forget the past are destined to relive it,' ' and
that the reliving could be improved through a
reflective design methodology.
First-Order Analysis
Dr. Carroll stated that tools in use
(''artifacts in situ'') are the best source of
14 OCLC Newsletter january/February 1991
productive new ideas and make empirical
claims as to their usefulness. For example,
VisiCalc, the first commercial spreadsheet
program, provided new tools that enabled
users to manipulate quickly and easily num­bers
in a matrix. The functionality inher­ent
within the program raised new
possibilities for re-design work. Thus, by
extracting empirical observations of useful­ness
from a tool in use, designers can de­volve
a ''psychology of the tasks
involved.''
A study of tasks can become a proactive
design tool with which designers can spec­ify
a system's requirements from the out­side
in, said Dr. Carroll. A product's
specification should articulate what users
need and want to do. A period of' 'succes­sive
envisioning' ' should follow until a sin­gle
system design is achieved that can
implement the scenario of user actions.
A scenario-based design is essential for
both development and system evaluation,
and can serve as the basis for designing task­oriented
documentation and training. This
approach emphasizes discovering and uti­lizing
the psychology found within tools in
use. It focuses on the way people use tools
to solve real problems. It produces a bal­ance
between low-level analyses and the
coherence provided by a broader context.
Dr. Carroll's design methodology en­courages
reflection and the cumulation of
data through an iterative design cycle. This
pragmatic approach supports the use of
claims analysis, provides a discipline to the
hermeneutic visionaries in the field of sys­tem
design, and enriches the science of cog­nitive
psychology by providing a richer,
context-based view of human behavior and
psychology.-ErlkJul is Communications
Manager, OCLC Office of Research. e
'
,/
creatin~ li~ra~ ~alaxies of t~e 21st centu~
OCLC's Group Access Capability (GAG) is helping libraries create new galaxies of cooperative resource
sharing. Within each galaxy, libraries with a common denominator, such as geography or library type,
maximize their access to materials for their patrons. ~
Group Access
provides improved
resource sharing
capabilities
by Nita Dean
OCLC's Group Resource Sharing Options
were developed to help library groups ex­pand
their resource-sharing activities. The
Group Access Capability (GAC) provides
OCLC Interlibrary Loan (ILL) Subsystem ac­cess
to cooperative groups so all of the
group's participants, both OCLC members
and nonmembers, can interact with one an­other
via the ILL Subsystem.
''One of the major benefits of GACs, as
well as Union Lists and SharePAC, is that
they bring smaller libraries into the main­stream,''
said Paul Cappuzzello, OCLC Se­nior
Marketing Representative. ''The
Group Access Capability can expand a
small library's access to resources at an af­fordable
price."
Each group must include at least one
OCLC member-a library that contributes
all current cataloging to the OCLC Online
Union Catalog. A group's database is cre­ated
and maintained through OCLC Online
System activity (current and retrospective
cataloging and serials union listing),
through tapeloading, through other retro­spective
conversion processes, and
through OIT CD450, a microcomputer­based
compact disc cataloging system.
After a group database is created
through the addition to the OCLC Online
Union Catalog of the records of the group's
members, all group participants, both
OCLC members and nonmembers, have ac­cess
to it. The records are pulled into a sin­gle
database through an automated
profiling procedure and made available to
members as an integrated subset of the
OCLC Online Union Catalog. The group
database is accessible during normal Online
System operating hours and uses all stan­dard
OCLC record-access points.
Within a group, there are two types of li­braries:
OCLC members and selective
users. OCLC members search the Online
Union Catalog for a bibliographic record
and then identify which members of the
SPECIAL REPORT
group hold the item. Selective users are
non-OCLC-member libraries. They may ac­cess
abbreviated bibliographic records
from the entire Online Union Catalog,
search the group database, and borrow and
lend within their group. Though they do
not have access to the locations and hold­ings
data of libraries outside their group, re­quests
for materials that cannot be filled
from within the group can be referred by
an OCLC member library to any of the
more than 4,000 libraries in the OCLC
Interlibrary Loan network.
''Because libraries want to make the
best use of their funds and provide wide ac­cess
to information, resource sharing is an
area that's beginning to drive the library
world,'' said Mr. Cappuzzello. ''With the
range of products and services available
through OCLC and the potential for mixing
and matching them, all types of libraries
can benefit from OCLC's resource-sharing
options.'' -Nita Dean is Assistant Editor,
OCLC Newsletter.
A profiling profile
The profiling process for Group Access Ca­pability
(GAC) is usually completed within
two to three weeks. When Joyce Myers,
Product Administration Specialist, receives
the list of libraries in a newly formed group
from the group's OCLC regional network,
she assigns a three-character symbol to
each nonmember library, choosing the sym­bols
from a computerized alphabetical list
of available codes. ''I try to align the code
with the institution name when it's possi­ble,''
Ms. Myers said, ''but many symbols
are already in use.' '
According to Gloria Steriti, OCLC Proftl­ing
Supervisor, the steady growth in the
number of libraries participating in the
Group Access Capability is responsible for a
dramatic rise in the number of three-letter
codes assigned to OCLC participating librar­ies,
which are now at 13,000.
''Sixteen years ago the codes were
changed from having only two letters to
three,'' she said, ''giving OCLC some
24,000 possible combinations using 26let­ters,
nine single-digit numbers, and seven
special characters: +, S, &, •, %, #,and
16 OCLC Newsletter January/February 1991
@." With approximately 11,000 three-let­ter
code combinations remaining, Ms.
Steriti said there is probably a five-year sup­ply
of three-letter symbols at the current
rate libraries are being added.
SoLINE is largest
GAC, links 1 ,400
libraries
by Nancy Campbell
SoLINE, the SOLINET Information Net­work,
is a resource sharing network of li­braries
in the Southeastern United States.
So LINE users are either SOLINET/OCLC
members or selective users. With 1, 400 li­braries
in 10 states and the Caribbean, So­LINE
is the largest Group Access Capability
(GAC) organization in the OCLC commu­nity.
Through the SoLINE GAC, these li­braries
have access to 56 million
monographic holdings and 400,000 serials.
SoLINE was organized in 1989 under
the leadership of SOLINET's Resource Shar­ing
and Networks Support Forum. During
1989, OCLC proftled a Group Database for
SOLINET-area libraries made up of state net­work
GACs, local consortia, and Union List
of Serials (ULS) groups. ' 'The response
from SOLINET members was overwhelm­ing,'
' said Steve Baughman, Member and
Network Relations Manager, SOLINET.
''Out of 650 members, 600 elected to par­ticipate.'
' So LINE began operation in
March 1990.
As SoLINE members, these libraries
have a regional resource-sharing database
and a network for interlibrary lending.
The selective users of SoLINE have access
to holdings beyond their own local or state
groups; they can now borrow from any
participating library in the Southeast.
So LINE members can use a single OCLC
command to view all the holdings in their
region for any given title. SoLINE also pulls
local information on serials holdings into a
combined ULS display. So LINE members
can borrow from any other SoLINE mem­ber
and, when necessary, can borrow from
any of the 4,000 members of the OCLC
Interlibary Loan (ILL) Network. According
SPECIAL REPORT
to Mr. Baughman, there is a significant re­duction
in ILL paperwork because verified
messages are sent electronically to the So­LINE
libraries that own the requested items.
Mr. Baughman said that in the initial
planning phases for SoLINE, the SOLINET
Resource Sharing and Networks Support
Forum expressed concern that member li­braries
would automatically send their ILL
requests to the largest libraries in SoLINE.
Collection analysis revealed, however, that
there was less duplication than expected
and that many of the smaller libraries had
strong collections in various areas. A sys­tem
of distribution protocols was devel­oped
so that all members would share the
workload (and the lending credits). The
plan calls for requests to be routed ftrst to
libraries of the same type as the initiating
library.
has been extremely positive and there­gional
tier in the resource-sharing arena is
really showing its worth. So LINE would
not have happened without the hard work
of the Resource Sharing and Networks Sup­port
Forum participants and the ready will­ingness
of the SOLINET member libraries
to participate and share resources at a
broader level. ' ' -Nancy Campbell is Pub­''
We are very pleased with So LINE's lic Relations Writer, OCLC.
ftrst year,'' said Mr. Baughman. ''Feedback
A new CD-based resource-sharing system Is helping 21 colleges In
Kentucky Improve their library services
by Nita Dean
I ntroduced in November 1990 by Auto-Graphics and OCLC,
SharePAC is a compact-disc resource-sharing system that
provides online access to the OCLC Interlibrary Loan Sub­system
for extended resource sharing. It can provide in­creased
functionality and cost
savings for Union List Groups
vide maximum beneftts for its libraries. ' 'All of our institutions
are members of the Kentucky Library Network, which is plan­ning
to form a Group Access Capability and upload its records to
the OCLC database,'' she said. ''Group Access, SharePAC, and
our union catalog on CD-ROM
offer our libraries much more
and Group Access Capability
(GAC) participants.
The Council of Independent
Kentucky Colleges and Universi­ties,
a consortium of 21 indepen­dent
institutions, will be one of
the first groups to use SharePAC. ~SharePAC
flexibility for access to increased
resources. ' '
Through the project, each of
the 21 libraries will receive a
workstation, printer, and CD­ROM
reader, and will have the op­tion
of using the equipment in
technical services or as an online
public access catalog.
According to Christie Robin­son,
Director of Retrospective
Conversion and Automation for
Unique resource sharing from OCLC and Auto-Graphics
the Council, the process leading
to the development of the Group Access Capability began in
1984 with a planning grant from the Teagle Foundation and the
hiring of Susan Baerg Epstein as a consultant to study the 21
institutions' collections.
According to Ms. Robinson, Ms. Epstein determined that the
combined collections of the 21 institutions had little overlap and
a large number of unique records.
Ms. Robinson said conversion of the libraries' catalogs to ma­chine-
readable form was the flfSt step in the process of providing
electronic access to the collections, and with the help of addi­tional
grants from the Pew Charitable lhlsts, the James Graham
Brown Foundation, and the Ashland Oil Foundation, nearly 1
million of the consortium's records were converted to machine­readable
form.
Ms. Robinson said the consortium received a U.S. Department
of Education Higher Education Act Title ll-D grant for automa­tion
in the fall of 1989. The consortium reviewed a number of
automation alternatives and decided that SharePAC would pro-
Ms. Robinson said the libraries
are excited about the increased
access SharePAC will provide. ''It gives them the option of being
able to share resources through OCLC,' ' she said. ''And we're
looking forward to having subject access to the materials in the
independent colleges through SharePAC's compact disc catalog.' '
''The major advantage,'' she said, ''is that it allows smaller in­stitutions
to participate in technology and have access to re­cords.
Without it, they would have been isolated.' '
' 'SharePAC provides a GAC with a compact-disc version of the
group's database and holdings,'' said Bob Adamson, Department
Manager, OCLC Resource Sharing Products Group. ' 'With this
system, libraries reduce online telecommunications charges for
searching and locating holdings information since their database
is on compact disc. Another cost-effective feature is SharePAC's
ability to function as an online public access catalog with a user­friendly
interface that patrons can use.' ' - Nita Dean is Assistant
Editor, OCLC Newsletter.
OCLC Newsletter January/February 1991 17
SPECIAL REPORT
Group Access Capability groups growing
OCLC 's Group Access Capability was introduced in 1984. Since its introduction, the number of
GACs and GAC/Union Lists has grown to 60.
Multlstatelprovlncelterrltory
BCR Group Access Project
MINITEX Group Access
New England Union List and Group Access Catalog
Northwest Group Access Program
SOLI NET Information Network (SoLIN E)
Regional
49-99 Cooperative Library System/Central Association of Libraries
Bloomington & Normal Cooperative Union List of Serials
California State University Union List of Serials
Capital District Library Council
Central Florida Library Consortium
Central New York Library Resources Council
Chicago Public Schools
Independent Schools Library Exchange
Inland Pacific Academic Libraries
Long Island Library Resources Council
Metro Region GAC
North Carolina Health & Science Library GAC
North County Reference & Research Resource Council
OH-KY Cooperative Libraries Union List of Serials
Rochester 3R's Union List of Serials
Rochester Regional Resources Library Council Access Group
Southeast Florida Library Information Network (SEFLIN)
South Central Resources Library Council Group Access
Southeastern New York GAC
SUNY Union List of Serials & ILL Group
Tampa Bay Library Consortium Group Access Project (TBLC)
Tulsa Area Library Cooperative-TALC
Western NY Library Resources Council
World Wide Access Group-Group Access
18 OCLC Newsletter January/February 1991
Colorado, Utah
Minnesota, North Dakota, Ontario, South Dakota
Connecticut, Massach.usetts, Maine, New Brunswick, New
Hampshire, Ontario, Quebec, Rhode Island, Vermont
Alaska, Alberta, British Columbia, Idaho, Montana, Oregon,
Washington
Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi,
North Carolina, Puerto Rico, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia,
U.S. Virgin Islands
California
Illinois
California
New York
Florida
New York
Illinois
California
California
New York
New York
North Carolina
New York
Kentucky, Ohio
New York
New York
Florida
New York
New York
New York
Florida
Oklahoma
New York
Maryland, Pennsylvania, West Virginia
SPECIAL REPORT
Special
American Theological Users Group
Association of Big 8 Universities
Canadian Libraries in OCLC
Federal Libraries and Information Centers Group Access
Federal Reserve Network
LEGEND (Legal Electronic Network and Database)
South Central Academic Medical Libraries Consortium
VALR: Veterans Affairs Learning Resources Network
Vendor Publishers Group Access
Statewide
Alabama Union List of Serials
California Resource Sharing Network (XPRS)
Connecticut Union List of Serials
Florida Library Information Network
GAC in Oklahoma
Georgia Online Database (GOLD)
Indiana Union List of Serials
Kansas Union List of Serials
Missouri Interlibrary Loan Group
MLC Online Union Catalog
Nebraska Electronic Online Network (NEON)
Nevada State Group Access
New Jersey Union List of Serials
New York Statewide Group Access
North Carolina Online Union Catalog
Pennsylvania Libraries Group Access
Rhode Island Library Network
Serials in Ohio Union List
Serials of Illinois Libraries Online
South Carolina Library Database
VA$L
Wisconsin Interlibrary Group Access
Alabama
California
Connecticut
Florida
Oklahoma
Georgia
Indiana
Kansas
Missouri
Michigan
Nebraska
Nevada
New Jersey
New York
North Carolina
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
Ohio
Illinois
South Carolina
Virginia
Wisconsin
OCLC Newsletter January/February 1991 19
Canadian and
American libraries
cooperate in Pacific
Northwest
by Nancy Campbell
The Northwest Group Access {NWGA) Proj­ect
was started in 1985 for libraries in the
Pacific Northwest Library Association re­gion-
Alaska, Alberta, British Columbia,
Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington.
Originally a Group Access Capability
project to link 24 libraries of the Northwest
Association of Private Colleges and
Universities, the program now has over
150 members, including OCLC member
libraries and selective users, all with access
to OCLC's Interlibrary Loan (ll.L) Subsystem.
Carla Crook, Library Technician at the
Everett (Wash.) Public Library, said that she
is very pleased with the Northwest Group
Access Project. ''It has cut ILL turnaround
time from six weeks to between two and
three,'' she said. ' 'And it has increased our
fill rate to 98 percent.' ' Ms. Crook said she
also likes being able to tell patrons the sta­tus
of their request-whether it has been
sent or is still being searched.
''It sure made my life easier,'' said
Dorothea Crawford, Information Specialist
at the James River Corporation, Camas,
Wash. ''The NWGA Project has opened up
so many resources for publications. ' '
Project participants can draw on each
other's collections for interlibrary lending
and also have access to the three interna­tional
and nine American institutions
which serve as document suppliers to the
OCLC ILL Subsystem. These are:
• British Library Document Supply
Centre (BLDSC)
• Center for Research Libraries
• Centre de Pret at the Bibliotheque
Nationale
• Chemical Abstracts Service
• ERIC Document Reproduction Service
• Engineering Societies Library
• Institute for Scientific Information's The
Genuine Article
SPECIAL REPORT
• Library of Congress
• National Agricultural Library
• National Technical Information Service
• University Microfilms International
''The Northwest Group Access Project
has been enormously successful, both in
participation and in efficiency,' ' said Ruth
Sawyer, Regional Marketing Representative
for the OCLC Pacific Network. ' 'Program
members receive the lending requests elec­tronically
on the OCLC ILL Subsystem
rather than getting a combination of tele­phone,
mail, and electronic messages.
They can be processed efficiently on one
system." ·
''Northwest Group Access is a boon to
all its members because it restores resource
sharing patterns that were disrupted as li­braries
automated at different rates and in
different ways, ' ' said Bruce Preslan, Direc­tor
of the OCLC Pacific Network. ''In par­ticular,
state libraries and small libraries
benefit because now no library need be left
out of a state or region's online resource
sharing activities.' ' -Nancy Campbell is
Public Relations Writer, OCLC.
California XPRS
speeds materials to
patrons
by Nita Dean
' 'We had a lot of libraries that wanted to
participate in OCLC's Interlibrary Loan Sub­system,
but for one reason or another
could not contribute their holdings to
OCLC,'' said Bruce Preslan, Director, OCLC
Pacific Network (PACNET).
To enable those libraries to participate,
PACNET formed the California statewide
Group Access Capability {GAC) in January
1990. ''We named it XPRSbecause it
would be easy to locate what you want
and borrow it quickly electronically,'' said
Mr. Preslan.
''We asked our members if they would
have any objections to being part of a
Group Access Capability,' ' he said, ''and
only one library indicated it would not par-
20 OCLC Newsletter January/February 1991
ticipate since its holdings consist of rare
books that aren't loaned.''
A year after its formation, XPRS has 380
participating libraries and document suppli­ers,
and more than 33 million holdings.
Mr. Preslan said all full OCLC members in
California belong to the GAC; non-OCLC­member
libraries now have the option of
participation as selective users.
Kent Backstrom, Library Assistant at the
California School of Professional Psychol­ogy
in San Diego, which is a selective user,
said, ' 'Now that I'm familiar with the ba­sics,
I like the system.' '
Mr. Backstrom said XPRS has three main
advantages: You can identify a selection of
holders that are geographically nearby; you
generally know the lending policies of
those libraries; and with the ability to enter
five lenders, you can feel comfortable that
you will get the requested item.
According to Mr. Backstrom, libraries in
California have a significant combined col­lection,
particularly for monographs.
''Usually, items are available through
XPRS,' ' he said. ' 'I'd say there are less than
a half dozen instances in a couple hundred
transactions when an item is not available.' '
In the past, interlibrary loan work re­quired
librarians to be like detectives, said
Mr. Backstrom. ' 'It was interesting, but
also frustrating.'' -Nita Dean is Assistant
Editor of the OCLC Newsletter.
Looking back at LSCA
funding, 1956-now
by Nancy Campbell
The first Library Services Act was passed in
May 1956, 11 years after the American
Library Association (ALA) opened its Wash­ington,
D. C., office to monitor and lobby
for legislation affecting libraries, and after
seven attempts to get federal funding for
American public libraries. Congress then
appropriated 52.05 million for the new
law's first year of improving library ser­vices
in rural areas, less than 2 percent of
the S 131.7 million committed to the pro­gram
this year.
The Library Services Act has been con­tinued
and expanded by legislators through
the years, usually in five-year cycles. In
1964, ·the name of the law was changed to
the Library Services and Construction Act
(LSCA). ''LSCA has been a tremendously
successful program that has provided seed
money and incentives for greater state and
local support for library services,'' said
Elinor Hashim, OCLC Government Rela­tions
Officer.
The 1964law made funds available to
urban populations as well as rural ones and
provided a separate program for construc­tion
funds (Title II). In 1966, the LSCA
program added Title III, Inter-library
Cooperation, although funding was not
appropriated until1969.
Today, LSCA funds are administered by
the U.S. Department of Education's Office
of Library Programs. The funds for Titles I,
II, and III are allocated to state and terri­tory
library agencies based on population.
Libraries or library organizations can apply
for Title I funds ($82.2 million in fiscal
1991) for Public Library Services, such as
improving services to areas with inade-
SPECIAL REPORT
quate library services, improving the re­sources
of state library agencies, library
services to the blind or physically handi­capped,
and literacy. LSCA Title I funds are
currently being used to support 1 ,900
projects.
LSCA Title II funds (S 18.8 million in fis­cal
1991) are earmarked for the construc­tion
of new library spaces. Grant money
can be used for expanding or remodeling
existing buildings, as well as for buying
land, paying architect's fees, and building
new libraries. In 1990, Title II funds were
helping 150 public libraries support the
cost of building.
LSCA Title III funds (S 19.5 million in fis­cal
1991) are made available for Interlibr­ary
Cooperation and Resource Sharing. A
variety of automation tools such as circula­tion
systems, computerized catalogs, and
cooperative acquisitions systems, as well as
programs for the preservation of library
materials can be funded with Title III mon­ies.
Almost 400 regional, state, and local
projects to help libraries share and preserve
materials are being partially funded by
LSCA Title III. Eight OCLC Group Access
Capability or Serials Union List groups have
received LSCA Title III funds.
''LSCA has always enjoyed widespread
support in the Congress, mostly because
legislators have learned of the benefits of
the program firsthand from their constitu­ents,
thanks to ALA's annual Legislative
Day,' ' said Ms. Hashim. ' 'Various Presi­dents
over the years, however, have at­tempted
to eliminate the program, arguing
that funding of libraries is a state and local
responsibility, and not that of the federal
government.' '
The most recent version of the Library
Services and Construction Act also includes
Title IV, for Library Services to Indian
Tribes and Hawaiian Natives; Title V, for
Public and State Libraries to acquire foreign
language materials; Title VI, for Library Lit­eracy;
Title VII, for the evaluation and as­sessment
of LSCA by the Department of
Education; and Title VIII, for Family Learn­ing
Centers. The first six titles were funded
in the fiscal1991 budget; the last two were
not.-Nancy Campbell is Public Relations
Writer, OCLC. e
OCLC Newsletter January/February 1991 21
''Previous efforts
toward shared
collection
development have
been difficult
because of the lack
of information
about who really
owns what. ' '
INTERVIEW
joe B. Forsee
The Georgia Division of Public Library Services
coordinates GOLD, Georgia Online Database, a statewide
Group Access Capability.
Joe Forsee is Director, Division of Public Library Ser­vices,
Georgia Department of Education. Prior to
joining the Georgia Department of Education in
1980, he held several positions with the Mississippi
Library Conunission including Consultant, Assis­tant
Director for Administration, and Director of
the Conunission. From 1973 unti11976 he was
Director, Interlibrary Cooperation, Kentucky De­partment
of Library and Archives, and from 1972 to
1973 he was Associate Regional Librarian for the
Barren River Regional Library, a 1 0-county Ken­tucky
library system.
Mr. Forsee holds a bachelor's degree in library
science from Murray State University in Kentucky,
and a master's in library science from the University
of Kentucky.
He has been active in the Kentucky, Mississippi,
and Georgia Library Associations as well as the
Southeastern Library Association and the American
Library Association. He is past Vice President of the
White House Conference on Library and Informa­tion
Services Thsk Force, and he has served as a
member of the Board of Directors of the Chief Offi­cers
of State Library Agencies and currently chairs
the group's publication conunittee.
Newsletter: What has been the state
library's role in library automation in
Georgia?
Forsee: The primary role has been dealing
with multi-type library automation. We see
our role as dealing with automation as a
resource-sharing issue and we think of that as
the sharing of data and resources. One of our
main roles has been to emphasize MARC.
We've funded some library automation, but
very little in comparison to what's needed, so
we have tried to give libraries of whatever
type information about the direction in which
the state library is headed (for automation)
rather than mandating one automation prod­uct
for all libraries. ln the 80s, we emphasized
compatibility of systems rather than everyone
having to use one system. Only 50 percent of
our public libraries currently have an auto­mated
circulation system while almost all have
automated administrative functions. The state
funded this administrative automation, giving
each public library system access to common
hardware and software. We call that system
GENESIS. GENESIS gives every public library
system access to a PC and modem, assuring
them the capability of accessing GOLD, the
Georgia Online Database, our GAC [Group Ac­cess
Capability) with OCLC and SOLINET.
In the early 80s, we knew we did not have
the money to offer automation at state ex­pense
to all libraries. We saw our role as being
a facilitator of information about automation
and a potential fund raiser for various projects
that might have a potential state impact. We
did two things in this regard. One was to or­ganize
and fund four two-day workshops for
all kinds of libraries held around the state.
Our main intent with those workshops was to
bring librarians, but especially public library
directors, to at least a minimal level of auto­mation
vocabulary, a basic understanding of
22 OCLC Newsletter January/February 1991
what computers can do for libraries, and an
understanding of how the Division of Public
Library Services (DPLS) would attempt its
own automation. Those workshops were
very successful and reinforced for libraries
the need for the MARC format and the inser­tion
of common identifiers such as OCLC
number, LC number, ISBN, into local biblio­graphic
records.
The Division has also worked with com­mittees
of librarians on several occasions in
the development of proposals for a statewide
bibliographic database. That aim was realized
with the creation of GOLD.
The State Library Administrative Agency
has worked with the State Department of Ed­ucation
to propose a library circulation sys­tem
for public libraries (initially) that are
using the GENESIS administrative system. An
RFP [request for proposal] was drafted and
submitted to state purchasing. If this is
funded, a one-year pilot project will be held
at the Uncle Remus Regional Library System.
Based on the modifications made during the
pilot, a fmal product would then be offered
to interested library systems. It is anticipated
that other types of library organizations
might install the same system or a modifica­tion
of that system. The availability of a state­funded
circulation system is a strong incen­tive
for the conversion of bibliographic re­cords
to machine-readable form.
Newsletter: How was the decision
reached to create a state database in
Georgia?
Forsee: The existing interlibrary lending sys­tem
had become too cumbersome. GLIN, the
Georgia Library Information Network, is a
manual system. Over 50 percent of the mem­bers
were special libraries. There was really
no way to enforce reciprocal lending in a man­ual
system with the result that the DPLS and
four large academic libraries were doing 89
INTERVIEW
Photo courtesy/Joe Forsee
percent of the interlibrary lending in the state.
There was the indication that this could not
be continued so we looked for some way to
spread the lending load. We looked at differ­ent
systems available on the market and de­cided
that since Georgia already had a
substantial database through OCLC and
SOLINET, the Group Access Capability was
our most practical course to follow. We met
with the members of GLIN and received an
overwhelming vote of support to pursue
forming a GAC.
Newsletter: Is a state database an easy
concept to sell to the legislature?
Forsee: We really haven't had to sell this to
the legislature because of the way we pursued
the database. Every library on GOLD is paying
its own way, so it has not been necessary tore­quest
funds from the legislature. The Division
paid some initial profiling fees. The Division
joe B. Forsee
OCLC Newsletter January/February 1991 23
''GOLD makes it
easier to obtain
items for patrons. ''
INTERVIEW
has also funded a number of training work­shops.
The majority of these are provided
through contracts with SOLINET. Other than
those costs, libraries choosing to be members
pay for their own equipment, phone calls,
data entry, etc.
Newsletter: What's the purpose of a
state database like GOLD?
Forsee: There are a number of purposes for
GOLD. One is to spread the interlibrary lend-·
ing burden so that not just a few libraries
shoulder the total load. GOLD also promotes
resource sharing during a time of budget cuts.
This has been especially valuable in the area of
serials, and we anticipate it will become a
more important purpose as materials purchas­ing
dollars are reduced and as the purchasing
power of those dollars shrinks. Another pur­pose
is to enable libraries to take advantage of
the resources available within the immediate
area. Also, GOLD allows the creation of a
shared database for specific groups of libraries
through either online or CD-ROM products.
For example, law libraries or school media cen­ters
or a local consortium could create their
own subset of state data. If they do this in a
CD format they can search their own holdings
in the more economical offline atmosphere.
Another purpose of GOLD is to give libraries a
common standard and format to build on
rather than each library or associated library
group going their own way with little or no or­ganization
or compatibility.
Newsletter: Where does Georgia rank
in library service?
Forsee: Georgia is probably the national
leader in public library construction. Georgia
traditionally ranks in the top 10 states in per
capita state aid funding. The latest figures that
I've seen rank Georgia as number 1 nationally
in state aid funds per capita.
24 OCLC Newsletter January/February 1991
In terms of Group Access Capability, I think
we are ahead of a number of states because
we have formulated rules and regulations
which members must follow, setting dates by
which libraries must have tapeloaded hold­ings,
setting membership criteria, and defm­ing
membership responsibilities, and have set
a timetable for libraries to convert from the
manual GUN system to GOLD.
Newsletter: How was OCI.C chosen to
provide the system?
Forsee: OCLC and SOLINET presented the
proposal for a state-wide database utilizing the
Group Access Capability. Georgia library direc­tors
and GUN members voted to have DPLS
pursue creation of a database in this marmer.
One of the primary reasons for this choice was
that Georgia libraries which were full mem­bers
of SOLINET and OCLC had already en­tered
several million monograph records into
the OCLC database. This kept large academic li­braries
from having to re-load records and
saved data entry time for smaller libraries.
Newsletter: Who coordinates the
database and what is involved?
Forsee: The Division of Public Library Ser­vices
coordinates the database. Our Consul­tant
for Reader Services meets with a GOLD
Advisory Committee and a GOLD Serials Com­mittee
to consider needed rules, operational
refmements, and so forth.
Newsletter: Who participates in the
Georgia Online Database and why?
Forsee: Most of the libraries currently partic­ipating
in GOLD have chosen to be members
because there are advantages for them. Inter­library
lending through GOLD is faster than
the old GUN system, and GOLD makes it eas­ier
to obtain items for patrons. Librarians have
told us that it is not necessarily cheaper to use
GOLD than a manual system, but the response
time for their patrons is much faster and they
would not go back to the manual system. We
fmd that smaller libraries are extremely de­voted
to GOLD, where one might expect that
larger libraries with more staff members and
more automation experience might have been
the most excited about its use.
Libraries of all types are eligible for GOLD
participation. The only group that is not
heavily represented at the moment is school
media centers. We stress that they are eligible
for membership under the same rules and
conditions as other kinds of libraries.
Beginning in July, we will begin phasing
out GUN operations. The frrst group of li­braries
facing the choice of joining GOLD or
ceasing to be members of a statewide inter­lending
system will be special for-profit librar­ies.
Newsletter: Why is it necessary to dif­ferentiate
the holdings of Georgia librar­ies
from other libraries in the Southeast?
Forsee: There are some libraries that are
willing to lend to other Georgia libraries, but
not to the entire Southeastern library commu­nity.
I understand that SOLINET will give the
same capabilities to all the libraries in the
Southeast that GOLD gives Georgia libraries. I
feel that there will always be Georgia libraries
that are willing to lend to Georgians, but un­willing
to take on an additional responsibility
for lending throughout the region.
Newsletter: Have there been unexpected
problems?
Forsee: Some librarians seem surprised that
other librarians resist tapeloading require­ments.
The loading of holdings information
means that libraries truly will have to lend as
well as borrow materials since other network
INTERVIEW
members will now know what they own. Pre­viously
it was easy to say your library would
lend as well as borrow. This makes the com­mitment
a real one and creates some true bur­den
rather than what has been: a nominal
burden for a number of network members.
This was not a surprise to me however.
Newsletter: Have you had any feed­back
from business or higher education?
Forsee: Academic libraries have been
among GOLD's strongest supporters. Aca­demic
directors tell me they would not even
consider going back to the manual system.
We have received no complaints from special
libraries associated with the business commu­nity,
so they obviously feel they are getting
their money's worth.
Newsletter: What has been the budget­ary
impact of the state database?
Forsee: I believe the state database allows a
more effective use of budget dollars because
the database gives libraries access to so much
more material than was available previously.
Some library directors tell me that they have
to re-allocate dollars within their budgets be­cause
the costs of GOLD participation shows
up in different budget categories than was the
case under GUN. Under GUN, libraries had
to cover the cost of preparing and mailing
interlibrary loan forms. Under GOLD, the li­braries
experience higher telecommunications
costs. Other librarians have told me that their
cost to borrow a number of books is a fraction
of what buying those books would have cost.
Newsletter: What sort of long-term pro­jects
or programs will emerge from the
state database?
Forsee: I think one of the results of state
database creation will be the use of a single
''Once libraries
have bibliographic
records in MARC
f ormat, their only
limitation is their
imagination. ''
OCLC Newsletter January/February 1991 25
' 'With the budget
cuts we're seeing,
resource sharing
seems to be our only
answer for
providing the
material our
patrons need. , ,
INTERVIEW
state database rather than the development of
other databases and products by different seg­ments
of the Georgia library community. One
of the projects we anticipate is the develop­ment
of spin-offs from the main GOLD
database. I think the use of CD-ROM packages
for database accessibility for branch libraries
will be a long-range development. Another
long-term result will be the development of
formal resource sharing (collection develop­ment)
agreements. Previous efforts toward
shared collection development have been diffi­cult
because of the lack of information about
who really owns what. With GOLD a librar­ian
can determine that a title they need
occasionally but not every day is available
elsewhere in the system. This will allow that
librarian to purchase a title of more primary
importance in his/her library. In this way we
expect Georgians to have access to a greater
range of materials for the same collection­development
dollar. I'm not saying we can
cut materials purchasing budgets, only that the
dollars can be used more efficiently.
Newsletter: What does GOLD mean for
resource sharing?
Forsee: This is our initial platform on which
we intend to build our future efforts. Once li­braries
have bibliographic records in MARC
format, their only limitation is their imagina­tion.
It also means automation projects will
develop faster in Georgia than they would
have otherwise. GOLD is only two years old
but its use has grown much more rapidly than
anticipated. GOLD libraries have access to 8
million monograph records. We've gone from
an initial GOLD startup group of 62 members
to 167 members in two years. We went from
200 unique local data records for serials to
37,000. The use of any automated system
speeds other automation developments.
When a system can share data with other li­braries
statewide in an automated mode, the
26 OCLC Newsletter January/February 1991
drive for automation of local library functions
receives a considerable push. I think that
GOLD has moved us 10 years faster than we
would have moved otherwise.
Newsletten How much still needs to be
doneintennsofconvertingcollections
to machine-readable fonn so they can be
added to the database?
Forsee: We have just begun working on this.
West Georgia Regional Library will be our first
selective user to tapeload records. With the
requirements for GOLD membership, all mem­bers
must have begun loading current materi­als
by July 1, 1994. The requirement is not for
a total retrospective conversion but for load­ing
those titles purchased within the fiscal year
and available for loan.
Currently DPLS is putting little money into
record conversion. With libraries paying
their own way, we feel that requiring total
conversion would be impossible in the near
future. The requirement as we have ex­pressed
it demonstrates the direction in
which GOLD is headed and the commitment
to ensuring that all network members are
sharing the lending load.
Newsletter: What advice would you
give to other states considering the cre­ation
of a state database?
Forsee: Unquestionably, my highest recom­mendation
is to be sure the project has the sup­port
of the libraries in the state. In our case, a
significant majority of librarians have realized
this is our only reasonable alternative as a basis
for future state automation and an equitable re­source
sharing system. That majority has
helped to convert less enthusiastic librarians to
the cause.
Also, I would recommend that any system
developed be based on the MARC format so
that the database maintains flexibility for the
)
\
future. This increases compatibility for mem­bers
contributing records from differing auto­mation
systems. It also provides the ability to
load the database on other equipment and
with different vendors should the need arise
later.
Newsletter: Are state databases the wave
of the future?
Forsee: I think state databases are certainly
going to be seen in the future. With the bud­get
cuts we're seeing, resource sharing seems
to be our only answer for providing the mate­rial
our patrons need. Not for many years, if
INTERVIEW
ever, has a library been able to buy everything
needed. Using a database is the most cost-ef­fective
way to share material. Most large
databases have spoken for several years about
an ultimate need to decentralize at least por­tions
of the data currently held centrally. The
ability to use pieces of a central database with­out
accessing the central computers is desir­able
from both a cost and a technological
volume consideration. State databases allow
groupings among holders of data that are
more easily accommodated in this decentral­ized
fashion. State databases frequently allow
manipulation of the data at a cheaper cost. •
OCLC Newsletter January/February 1991 27
16 libraries to
participate in
reference field test
This spring, 16libraries across the United
States will begin a six-week field test of an
end-user version of EPIC, OCLC's online
reference system.
End-user EPIC has an easy-to-use menu
interface so that students, faculty, and
other library patrons can access the 23-mil­lion-
record OCLC Online Union Catalog
(OLUC) and Educational Resources Infor­mation
Center (ERIC) with a few simple
commands. Other databases will be added
in the future.
During the field test, library patrons will
have access to brief documentation, and
will be able to comment on the service and
its usability. Field-test librarians will be
asked to keep a tally of the number and
type of reference questions patrons ask,
report any problems, and complete an
evaluation form at the end of the test.
According to Thm Dalrymple, Manager,
OCLC Reference Services Marketing and
Support Section, the field test is designed
to examine end-user response to the fea­tures,
functionality, and usability in state,
school, public, and academic libraries of dif­fering
sizes.
''Information from the field-test librar­ies
will help fine-tune the service for the
library community and their patrons,'' said
Ms. Dalrymple. ''The field test will help us
analyze its effectiveness in filling users' in­formation
needs, test the effectiveness of
documentation, and test the functioning of
the service with different types of access,
(via dedicated line, Communications Con­troller,
or the Internet).'' She said dial-ac­cess
methods in addition to the Internet
will be available at a later date.
According to Ms. Dalrymple, the field­test
libraries are current users of the EPIC
service, OCLC's online reference system.
''We chose sites that were familiar with
EPIC and with the reference uses of the
OLUC and ERIC, and also those that pro­vide
a variety of access points for their pa­trons,''
she said.
Fees are on a sliding scale according to
the number of searches purchased. For ex-
PRODUCT NEWS
ample, one block of 500 searches can be
purchased for a cost of90 cents per search,
or 16o blocks of 80,000 searches can be
purchased for a cost of 45 cents per search.
There are no connect-time charges; how­ever,
telecommunications charges are at
the library's current rates.
If a library does not use all its purchased
searches in a fiscal year, unused searches
can carry over to the next year. If a library
needs more searches than it originally
planned for, additional searches can be pur­chased
at the original per-search price. Li­brarians
also have the option of returning
unused searches each}une for a refl.md.
(The service is available only to OCLC
member institutions that contribute to the
Online Union Catalog-full members,
tapeloading members, Major Microform
and CONSER participants, and selective
users- and to library schools.)
Field-test Sites
Allen County Public Library, Ft. Wayne, Ind.
The Claremont Colleges Libraries,
Claremont, Calif.
Cleveland Public Library, Cleveland, Ohio
College of William & Mary, Earl Gregg Swam
Library, Williamsburg, Va.
Columbus Public Schools, West High School
Microcomputer Software Library, Columbus,
Ohio
Grinnell College, Burling Library, Grinnell,
Iowa
Hamilton College, Burke Library, Clinton, N.Y.
Illinois State Library, Reference Department,
Springfield, Ill.
The Ohio State University, University
Libraries, Columbus, Ohio
St. John's University, Alcuin Library,
Collegeville, Minn.
Texas A&M University, Sterling C. Evans
Library, College Station, Texas
Texas Woman's University, Blagg-Huey
Library, Denton, Texas
University of Kansas Libraries, Lawrence,
Kan.
University of Maryland Libraries, College
Park, Md.
University of New Mexico, General Library,
Albuquerque, N.M.
28 OCLC Newsletter January/February 1991
University of Oregon, Knight Library,
Eugene, Ore.
Pharmaceutical News
Index is now available
on EPIC reference
service
PNI (Pharmaceutical News Index) is now
available via the EPIC service, OCLC's on­line
reference system. Published by
UMI/Data Courier, PNI contains current
and retrospective news about pharmaceuti­cals,
medical devices, cosmetics, and re­lated
health industries worldwide.
The database provides immediate access
to industry news and projected future de­velopments.
Nineteen major U.S. and inter­national
news publications are indexed
cover-to-cover in PNI. PNI's coverage
dates from 1974, and the database is up­dated
weekly with more than 600 records.
PNI also indexes Investext company
and industry reports prepared by leading
brokerage firms and fmancial research orga­nizations.
Coverage of these reports in­cludes
companies in the pharmaceutical,
medical device, and health care industries,
beginning in 1990.
''PNI will be of special value to medical,
biological science, and research librarians
because of its variety of information on
pharmaceutical companies, products, peo­ple,
legislation and regulations, research
progress, marketing trends, and trade and
professional association activities,' ' said
Thm Dalrymple, Manager, OCLC Reference
Services Marketing and Support Section.
When PNI is selected, the EPIC service
displays a message indicating the date that
PNI was last updated and the number of re­cords
it currently contains.
The EPIC service's U.S. online connect
charges for PNI are S 115 per connect hour.
U.S. online connect charges for PPNI, a
practice PNI database, are S 10 per hour. To
view complete PNI prices, EPIC users can
choose the PNI database and enter the com­mand
''SHOW PRICES. ' '
To select the PNI database, EPIC users
enter the command ''CHOOSE PNI' ' or
''CHOOSE 40,'' the PNI database number.
PPNI is accessed by entering the command
''CHOOSE PPNI'' or' 'CHOOSE 940.''
UMI/Data Courier, under agreement
with the publishers, can provide photocop­ies
of most PNI articles. PNI article photo­copies
are S 15 each and may be ordered
from the UMI Article Clearinghouse using
the OCI.C Interlibrary Loan Subsystem.
Full-text copies of Investext reports may be
ordered from Investext by calling ( 617)
345-2000.
Search assistance is available through
OCLC regional networks, or by calling the
OCLC User Contact Desk: (800) 848-5800
(USA); (800) 533-8201 (Canada); (614) 764-
6oOO (other), Monday through Friday, 7
a.m. to 6 p.m. Eastern Time.
Business Dateline is
available now on EPIC
Business Dateline, published by UMI/Data
Courier, now is available via the EPIC
service, OCI.C's online reference system.
Business Dateline provides access to hard­to-
fmd regional business information from
U.S. and Canadian publications.
With Business Dateline, librarians can
track businesses and industries in particular
locations; learn about corporate strategies;
identify mergers, acquisitions, expansions,
and business failures; proffie executives in
closely held companies; research new
products and marketing trends; and exam­ine
economic conditions in selected cities,
states, or regions.
''Business Dateline's specialized infor­mation
is particularly useful to corporate
and research librarians,' ' said Thm Dalrym­ple,
Manager, OCI.C Reference Services Mar­keting
and Support Section.
The database features full-text articles
selected from 200 regional journals, news­papers,
and wire services and is updated
weekly. Sources include titles such as
Crain's Chicago Business, Philadelphia
Business journal, and the Houston Busi­ness
journal.
Indexing of subjects, personal names,
and company data allows access to precise
information. In addition, indexed geo-
PRODUCT NEWS
graphic data help pinpoint the location of
events, determine which companies are
headquartered in a particular city, or focus
a search on a U.S. or Canadian region.
The EPIC service's online connect
charges for Business Dateline are S90 (U.S.)
per connect hour. Online connect charges
for PBD.IITE, a practice Business Dateline
database, are S 10 (U.S.) per hour. To view
complete Business Dateline prices, EPIC
users can choose the Business Dateline
database and enter the command' 'SHOW
PRICES.''
To select the Business Dateline database,
EPIC users enter the command ''CHOOSE
31,'' the Business Dateline database num­ber,
or ''CHOOSE BUSINESS DATELINE.' '
PBD.IITE is accessed by entering the com­mand
''CHOOSE 931'' or ''CHOOSE PBD­ATE."
Search assistance is available through
OCI.C regional networks, or by calling the
OCLC User Contact Desk: (800) 848-5800
(USA); (800) 533-8201 (Canada); (614) 764-
6000 (other), Monday through Friday, 7
a.m. to 6 p.m. Eastern Time.
The EPIC service is a full-featured on­line
reference system that provides subject
access, and keyword and Boolean search­ing
to a variety of databases. Six additional
databases currently are available via the
EPIC service: the OCI.C Online Union Cat­alog,
which provides bibliographic records
for 23 million books and other library ma­terials;
Educational Resources Information
Center (ERIC), which guides users to pub­lished
and unpublished sources on thou­sands
of educational topics; Book Data,
compiled by more than 900 British, Euro­pean,
and North American publishers, with
standard bibliographic and table-of-con­tents
information on not-yet-printed and in­print
books; ABIIINFORM, which covers
business and management topics, including
company histories, competitive intelli­gence,
and new product development; Dis­sertation
Abstracts, which covers the
complete range of academic subjects ap­pearing
in dissertations accepted at accred­ited
institutions since 1861; and
Pharmaceutical News Index (PNI), which
contains current and retrospective news
about pharmaceuticals, medical devices,
cosmetics, and related health industries
worldwide.
Easy Net online information service,
which also is accessible via the EPIC ser­vice,
provides access to references, ab­stracts,
and full texts of periodicals,
journals, news sources, company fact
sheets, statistics, credit reports, and re­search
fmdings.
The EPIC service is accessible via the
Internet.
Converted
bibliographic records
from Guildhall Library,
London, to enhance
OCLC database
OCI.C will convert to machine-readable
form 175,000 bibliographic records of the
Guildhall Library, London, England, which
is a member of Bl.CMP Library Services
Limited.
' 'This contract represents the first of
many conversion projects which OCI.C
Europe will defme and pursue in associa­tion
with Bl.CMP Library Services Limited,
one of OCI.C Europe's partners in the
United Kingdom,' ' said Phyllis Bova Spies,
Vice President, OCI.C International and
Conversion Services. OCI.C and Bl.CMP re­cently
announced the signing of an agree­ment
facilitating retrospective conversion
throughout Bl.CMP-member libraries using
the OCI.C database.
''We are delighted to be working with
OCI.C and Bl.CMP on this major project,''
said Melvyn Barnes, Guildhall Librarian.
''It will result in a greatly improved public
service, with modem technology giving ac­cess
to our long-established and interna­tionally
known collections.' '
The original medieval library at Guild­hall
was founded in the 1420s under the
terms of the will of Richard Whittington.
The modem institution dates from 1824
when the Corporation of London estab­lished
a reference library for all matters
relating to the City, the Borough of South­wark,
and the County of Middlesex. It has
been located in the west wing of Guildhall
since 1974.
OCLC Newsletter January/February 1991 29
Guildhall Library is divided into three
sections, each with its own specialized
staff, reading rooms, and catalogs. The
Printed Books Section specializes in
printed material on London, past and pres­ent,
but also is strong in the field of English
history and topography. Monographs in
this collection contain the histories and
studies of various aspects of London life.
Also included in the collection are broad­sides,
trade directories, poll books, local
government publications, and periodicals.
The Print Room contains the Library's col­lection
of engravings, drawings, maps and
photographs, most of which relate to Lon­don.
The Manuscripts Section is the local
record office for the City of London. Its
holdings date from the 11th century, and
include administrative and probate records
for the Diocese of London and for St. Paul's
Cathedral, and the archives of almost all of
the city's wards and parishes, and over 70
of its ancient livery companies.
According to Eileen Yandolino, OCLC
Retrospective Conversion Specialist, the
conversion will involve some 168,000 re­cords
for monographs and about 6,300 re­cords
for serials. ''We're anticipating that
approximately 22 percent of the collection
will be added as new records to the OCLC
Online Union Catalog,'' she said.
Ms. Yandolino said the project will
begin in February 1991 and will take ap­proximately
14 months to complete. She
brought back 22,000 handwritten catalog
cards from the Guildhall Library following
a recent visit. Guildhall Library staff will
deliver to OCLC the remaining catalog
cards, which are also handwritten, in four
installments.
Retrospective Conversion staff will cre­ate
monthly machine-readable OCLC
MARC tapes that will be sent to BLCMP
Library Services Limited for conversion to
UK MARC format for inclusion in an online
public access catalog supplied by BLCMP
through the City of London as part of its
BLS local library system.
PRODUCT NEWS
Largest OCLC
international
TAPECON project
processed for the
National Library of
Australia
OCLC recently processed 162,446 biblio­graphic
records from the National Library
of Australia through the OCLC TAPECON
Service. It is the largest international proj­ect
in the service's six-year history.
The project set holdings symbols for the
National Library of Australia to matching re­cords
in the OCLC Online Union Catalog
(OLUC) using the OCLC TAPECON Service,
a tape-to-tape batch processing service that
allows libraries to upgrade their records to
full MARC format without the need to re­key
data that is already on tape.
According to Andrew H. Wang, Direc­tor,
OCLC Asia Pacific and Technical Ser­vices
Division, Australian libraries,
including the National Library of Australia,
use the 8 million record database of the
Australian Bibliographic Network (ABN)
for cataloging and retrospective conver­sion.
They send the records they were un­able
to find in the ABN to OCLC where
they are machine searched using the OCLC
database of 23 million records.
''OCLC's wide range of retrospective
conversion services is enabling Australian li­braries
to convert their holdings on a cost­effective
basis," said Mr. Wang. "For this
project, the National Library of Australia
submitted search keys on tape for machine
matching against the OLUC, and in return,
received full MARC records of single
matches on magnetic tape.' '
The project is the result of an agreement
reached in 1988 through which OCLC will
load records from the National Library of
Australia into the OLUC in US MARC (rna­chine-
readable cataloging) format, and
more than 1,000 Australian libraries, includ­ing
the National Library of Australia, will
have the option of using the OCLC
MICROCON Service for retrospective con­version
of their holdings. Australian librar­ies
obtaining records from OCLC may load
them into Australia's National Bibliographic
30 OCLC Newsletter January/February 1991
Database where they will be available
through the ABN.
The OCLC MICROCON Service is ami­crocomputer-
based batch retrospective
conversion service that allows catalogers to
enter search keys and local data onto disk­ettes
or tapes, which are then sent to OCLC
for conversion. Search keys are entered on
MICROCON in the same formats used in
searching the OLUC. OCLC performs the
actual conversion by matching data on the
diskettes with records in the OLUC.
The National Library of Australia was es­tablished
in 1961. It publishes Australian
national bibliographies and the major sub­ject
index to Australian periodicals, main­tains
national union catalogs, provides
central cataloging services, and operates a
nationwide online resource-sharing net­work,
theABN.
National Taiwan
Normal University to
use OCLC TECHPRO
National Thiwan Normal University, Thipei,
Taiwan, will use the OCLC TECHPRO Tech­nical
Processing Service to acquire and cata­log
U.S. materials for its library. OCLC
expects to process approximately 10,000
books in the first year.
' 'The budgets for library materials in­crease
faster than those for library staff in
many countries,' ' said Andrew H. Wang,
Director, OCLC Asia Pacific and Technical
Services Division. ''OCLC's human-com­puter
work force stands ready to help li­braries
ease the pressure of staff shortages. ''
In addition, in August 1990 the National
Thiwan Normal University became the first
user of the OCLC Interlibrary Loan (ILL)
Subsystem in Thiwan.
''Using the OCLC ILL Subsystem will
raise the horizon of resource sharing be­yond
national boundaries,' ' said Mong­chen
Lin, Director of Libraries, National
Taiwan Normal University.
National Thiwan Normal University is
the largest and oldest teachers university in
Taiwan. It has a full-time student enroll­ment
of 15,000 and awards bachelor's,
master's, and doctorate degrees. National
Taiwan Normal University is an OCLC dial­access
user and an OCLC CAT-CD450 (off­line
CD-ROM for cataloging) and OCLC
Search CD450 (offline CD-ROM for biblio­graphic
citation searching) user.
The OCLC TECHPRO Technical Process­ing
Service offers traditional, off-site techni­cal
processing, including acquisitions,
cataloging, and physical processing. TECH­PRO
professionals work from photocopies,
workforms, or actual library materials to
perform services specified by libraries. Ma­terials
can be processed in all eight biblio­graphic
formats- books, serials,
audiovisual media, maps, archives and
manuscripts, sound recordings, scores, and
computer ftles.
Tapeloading added
675,000 records to
\ the database in
1989/90
by Phil Schieber
While online cataloging continues to be the
dominant form of participation in OCLC,
tapeloading has become a significant factor
in building the OCLC Online Union Catalog
(OLUC).
In fiscal1989/90, 5.8 million holdings
and more than 675,000 original cataloging
records were added to the OLUC via
tapeload. Fiscal1989/90's online activity
was 22.1 million records cataloged online,
of which 1. 3 million original records were
input at terminals.
''Thpeloading has come of age,'' said
MardaJohnson, Manager, Cataloging and
Database Services Department, OCLC.
''It's a form of mass communication be­tween
computer systems. For libraries that
have automated systems, it's become an im­portant
part of the way they communicate
with other libraries.· '
According to Ms. Johnson, while online,
interactive communication is still the pre­ferred
method for libraries to share re­sources
and catalog materials, tapeloading
) has emerged as a way for libraries that are
PRODUCT NEWS
working on diverse online systems to share
information with other libraries.
OCLC has approximately 90 regular
tapeloading members. OCLC regularly
loads records from the Library of Congress,
the National Library of Medicine, the Na­tional
Library of Canada, and the British
Library.
''OCLC's tapeloading participants range
from large research libraries to small, spe­cialized
libraries,'' said Ms. Johnson. ''We
handle cassettes (IBM 3480-compatible)
and reel-to-reelloads. Our largest project
last year involved some 583,292 records
from the University of California, Berkeley.
Our smallest was 120 records from Peace
College in Raleigh, N.C.''
Whatever the size of the project, OCLC
employs rigorous quality control measures
when processing the records. ' ' Our intent
is to keep the Online Union Catalog as
clean as we can,'' said Ms. Johnson.
The Thpeloading and Database Services
Section has four staff members who evalu­ate
incoming tapes to ensure that the re­cords
meet OCLC's quality standards for
tagging, formats, cataloging accuracy, and
duplicate records.
' 'We evaluate a sample of records,' ' said
Ms. Johnson. ''If the sample passes inspec­tion,
the tape is then sent to OCLC's pro­duction
control section, where it is run
against the OCLC database. The computer
programs will set the library's holding sym­bol
to a record in the OLUC that matches
the record on tape. Nonmatching records
are reported back to the institution for
manual conversion.' '
According to Ms. Johnson, libraries
choose to tapeload for a variety of reasons.
''Some research libraries catalog online
with RUN but want to share their holdings
with other libraries via OCLC. Some librar­ies
have recently joined OCLC and want to
get their retrospective holdings online as
quickly as possible. Others may be joining
a resource-sharing Group Access Capability
project. Some libraries take advantage of
our new software techniques to have their
local cataloging information upgraded to
full MARC format cataloging.''
Here is a sample of the tapeloading pro­jects
OCLC has performed in the past 18
months: Northwestern University-
750,000 holdings; Columbia University
Law School Library-100,000 holdings; De­partment
of Veteran Affairs Group Access
Program-650,000 holdings; University of
Michigan Library- 2 million holdings; and
Wayne-Oakland Library Federation (Michi­gan}-
1.4 million holdings.
In addition, OCLC has processed
61,000 records from the National Register
of Microform Masters held at the Library of
Congress as well as 69,864 Hebrew re­cords
from Harvard University Library'sJu­daica
Collection.
''We are also enhancing our tapeloading
software to enable us to merge unique data
with existing records,'' said Ms. Johnson.
' 'We can improve access points for foreign
languages.' ' For example, OCLC devised a
way to load Spanish subject headings from
records of the Hispanic database of the Cali­fornia
State Database with records extant
in the OLUC.-Phll Schieber is Editor of
the OCLC Newsletter.
XGMLValidator
Software available
through EPSIG
The Electronic Publishing Special Interest
Group (EPSIG) is now distributing Soft­ware
Exoterica Corporation XGML Valid­ator
software, a standard generalized
markup language (SGML) parser and valida­tion
tool. The software, which previously
sold for S 195. is now available for S65.
XGML software determines that the
markup in a document is correct by detect­ing
and listing errors. It will run on a 386
CPU MS-DOS machine with 4MB of mem­ory.
Cindy Sprague, Director of Business De­velopment
at Exoterica, said SGML is one
of the keys to the information technology
of the 90s, and that users should have ac­cess
to basic tools such as an SGML parser.
EPSIG is distributing the software on
5 !A -inch diskettes with the XGML Valid­ator
User's Guide (Version 1.0) and the
XGML Error Messages User's Guide (Ver­sion
3.2). For ordering information, con­tact
EPSIG Manager Betsy Kiser at (614)
764-6017 .•
OCLC Newsletter January/February 1991 31
Sorry about that
As a regular reader of the OCLC Newsletter,
I would like to make a suggestion towards
the improvement of your publication. Be­cause
language defines the way in which
we think, I believe it is important that we
try to free our language of unconscious se­mantic
biases. Gender specific language,
particularly the use ofthe word man as a
generic, tends to obscure the actions and
contributions of women in this world.
Let me refer specifically to page 35 of
the November/December issue of OCLC
Newsletter. The caption to one of the pho­tos
reads, ' 'The Colonel Richard Gimbel
Aeronautical Library has more than 20,000
items that provide a comprehensive record
of aeronautical history, from man's earliest
dreams of flight .... ' '
From The Handbook of Nonsexist Writ­ing
(Miller and Swift, 1980):
Recent studies of college students and
school children indicate that the broad defi­nitions
of man and men, although still
taught, have to a significant degree become
inoperative at a subliminal level. Phrases
like economic man and political man, or
II 6565 Frantz Road
Dublin, Ohio 4301 7- 0702
LETTERS
statements like ''Man domesticated ani­mals,''
and ''Man is a dreamer,'' it turns
out, tend to call up images of male people
only, not female people or females and
males together.
I doubt that there are people who ques­tion
whether or not women ever dreamed
of flight, or if they even contributed to the
development of human flight. However,
the sentence in your caption could easily
be clarified by reading ''peoples's earliest
dreams of flight .... ''
When one considers that women make
up the majority of the librarian profession,
and, therefore, many of your readers are
women, wouldn't it make sense to include
them in your written language? I hope that
you consider making the change to gender­neutrallanguage
a part of your editorial
policy. Thank you for your attention.
Kathryn S. Ginanni
Serials Acquisitions Librarian
Auburn University, Alabama
Editor: Thank you for pointing out our
slip-up. we will, indeed, attempt to be
more sensitive in future issues.
Pardon our Swedish
... the record ... was for a Swedish mono­graph
entitled Blomvattnarna: roman (The
Waterflowers: a novel) by Birgitta
Wipers ...
I have seen several references in OCLC
publications to the above 22nd million
OCLC record, and I now feel compelled to
write and tell you that the English transla­tion
you cite of this Swedish title is incor­rect.
Blomvattnarna translated into
English should be The Flower Waterers.
Your translation, Waterjlowers in Swedish
would be Vatten Bloommorna.
I don't mean to be picky but Swedish is
my native language, and every time I have
seen this citation, it has grated on my
nerves. I hope you won't take offense at
this note, and please allow me this opportu­nity
to thank you for your excellent system
support service.
Hjordis Madsen
Interlibrary Loan Department Head
Clark Library
San jose State University, Californiae
9012/5760VC-14M, TPC
NON-PROFIT ORG
U.S. POSTAGE
PAID
COLUMBUS, OHIO
PERMIT NO. 688