From the Print Media to the Internet by Marie Lebert (mobile ebook reader .TXT) 📕

What is the history of OCLC? According to the website:

"In 1967, the presidents of the colleges and universities in the state of Ohio founded the Ohio College Library Center (OCLC) to develop a computerized system in which the libraries of Ohio academic institutions could share resources and reduce costs.

OCLC's first offices were in the Main Library on the campus of the Ohio State University (OSU), and its first computer room was housed in the OSU Research Center. It was from these academic roots that Frederick G. Kilgour, OCLC's first president, oversaw the growth of OCLC from a regional computer system for 54 Ohio colleges into an international network. In 1977, the Ohio members of OCLC adopted changes in the governance structure that enabled libraries outside Ohio to become members and participate in the election of the Board of Trustees; the Ohio College Library Center became OCLC, Inc. In 1981, the legal name of the corporation became OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc. Today, OCLC serves more than 27,000 libraries of all types in the U.S. and 64 other countries and territories."

Both complementary and different from the OCLC Online Catalog (WordCat) with its 38 million records (with one record per document), the Research Libraries Information Network (RLIN) includes 88 million records (with several records per document).

RLIN is run by by the Research Libraries Group (RLG). The central RLIN database is a union catalog of nearly 88 million items held in comprehensive research libraries and special libraries in RLG member institutions, plus over 100 additional law, technical, and corporate libraries using RLIN. It includes:

a) Records that describe works cataloged by the Library of Congress, the National Library of Medicine, the U.S. Government Printing Office, CONSER (Conversion of Serials Project), The British Library, the British National Bibliography, the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections, and RLG's members and users;

b) Comprehensive representation of books cataloged since 1968 and rapidly expanding coverage for older materials;

c) Information about non-book materials ranging from musical scores, films, videos, serials, maps, and recordings, to archival collections and machine-readable data files;

d) Unique on-line access to special resources, such as the United Nations' DOCFILE and CATFILE records, and the Rigler and Deutsch Index to pre-1950 commercial sound recordings; and

e) International book vendors' in-process records that can be transferred by bibliographers, acquisitions libraries, and catalogers to create citations, order records, and cataloging in their local systems.

In RLIN, particularly valuable sources of processing information are available on-line:

a) A catalog of computer files: Machine-readable data files are of value to a growing number of disciplines. RLIN contains records describing a wide array of such files, from the full-text French literary works in the ARTFL Database to the statistical data collected by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan;

b) A catalog of archives and special collections: The archival and manuscript collections of research libraries, museums, state archives, and historical societies contain essential primary resources, but information about their contents has often been elusive. Archivists and curators worked with RLG to create an automated format for these collections. There are close to 500,000 records available in RLIN for archival collections located throughout North America. These records analyze many collections by personal name, organization, subject, and format.

Complementing the central bibliographic files of RLIN is the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), an invaluable research tool for scholars in English culture, language, and literature. This file provides extensive descriptions and holdings information for letterpress materials printed in Great Britain or any of its dependencies in any language, from the beginnings of print to 1800 - as well as for materials printed in English anywhere else in the world. Produced by the ESTC editorial offices at the University of California, Riverside, and the British Library, in partnership with the American Antiquarian Society and over 1,600 libraries worldwide, the file continues to be updated and expanded daily. ESTC serves as a comprehensive bibliography of the hand-press era and as a census of surviving copies.

ESTC included 420,000 records as of June 1998. It contains records for items of all types published in Great Britain and its dependencies or in English anywhere in the world from the beginnings of print (1473) through the 18th century - including materials ranging from Shakespeare and Greek New Testaments to anonymous ballads, broadsides, songs, advertisements and other ephemera. Extensive indexing includes imprint word, place, genre, and year as well as copy-specific notes. Searches may also be limited by date, language and country of publication.

8.3. Future Trends for On-Line Catalogs

The future of catalogs is linked to the harmonization of the MARC format. While MARC is an acronym for Machine Readable Catalogue or Cataloguing, this general description is rather misleading as MARC is neither a kind of catalogue nor a method of cataloguing. According to UNIMARC: An Introduction, a document of the Universal Bibliographic Control and International MARC Core Programme, MARC is "a short and convenient term for assigning labels to each part of a catalogue record so that it can be handled by computers. While the MARC format was primarily designed to serve the needs of libraries, the concept has since been embraced by the wider information community as a convenient way of storing and exchanging bibliographic data."

MARC II established certain principles which have been followed consistently over the years. In general terms, the MARC communication format is intended to be:

"- hospitable to all kinds of library materials;

- sufficiently flexible for a variety of applications in addition to catalogue production; and

- usable in a range of automated systems."

Over the years, however, despite cooperation efforts, several versions of MARC emerged, e.g. UKMARC, INTERMARC and USMARC, whose paths diverged because of different national cataloguing practices and requirements. Since the early 1970s an extended family of more than 20 MARC formats has evolved. Differences in data content means that editing is required before records can be exchanged.

One solution to the problem of incompatibility was to create an international MARC format (UNIMARC) which would accept records created in any MARC format. Records in one MARC format could be converted into UNIMARC and then be converted into another MARC format, so that each national agency would need to write only two programs - one to convert into UNIMARC and one to convert from UNIMARC - instead of one program for each other MARC format, (e.g. INTERMARC to UKMARC, USMARC to UKMARC etc.).

In 1977 the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutes (IFLA) published UNIMARC: Universal MARC format, followed by a second edition in 1980 and a UNIMARC Handbook in 1983, all focussed primarily on the cataloguing of monographs and serials, and taking advantage of international progress towards the standardization of bibliographic information reflected in the ISBDs (international standard bibliographic descriptions). In the mid-1980s it was considered necessary to expand UNIMARC to cover documents other than monographs and serials, so a new description of the format - the UNIMARC Manual -was produced in 1987. By this time UNIMARC had been adopted by several bibliographic agencies as their in-house format. But developments did not stop there. Increasingly, a new kind of format - an authorities format - was being used. As described in the website:

"Previously agencies had entered an author's name into the bibliographic format as many times as there were documents associated with him or her. With the new system they created a single authoritative form of the name (with references) in the authorities file; the record control number for this name was the only item included in the bibliographic file. The user would still see the name in the bibliographic record, however, as the computer could import it from the authorities file at a convenient time. So in 1991 UNIMARC/Authorities was published."

The Permanent UNIMARC Committee, charged with regularly supervising the development of the format, came into being that year, as users realized that continuous maintenance - not just the occasional rewriting of manuals - was needed. In maintaining the format, care is taken to make changes upwardly compatible.

In the context of MARC harmonization, The British Library (using UKMARC), the Library of Congress (using USMARC) and the National Library of Canada (using CAN/MARC) are in the process of harmonizing their national MARC formats. A three-year program to achieve a common MARC format was agreed on by the three libraries in December 1995.

Other organizations recommend the use of SGML (standard generalized markup language) as a common format for the bibliographic records and the corresponding hypertextual and multimedia documents.

As most of the publishers use the SGML format to store their documents, a convergence between MARC and SGML is expected to occur. The Library of Congress set up the DTD (definition of type of document, which defines its logical structure) for the USMARC format, because it will probably sell more and more data both in SGML and in USMARC. A DTD for the UNIMARC format has also been developed within the European Union. In his study L'accès aux catalogues des bibliothèques par Internet (The Access to Library Catalogs through the Internet), Thierry Samain specifies that some libraries choose the SGML format to encode their bibliographic data. In the Belgian Union Catalog, for example, the use of SGML allows one first to add descriptive elements stemming from the MARC format and other formats, and second to facilitate the production of the annual CD-ROM.

The libraries also have to adapt their thesauri and their key-word lists. In international bibliographic databases like the OCLC Online Union Catalog, the absence of a universal thesaurus is a real problem when you try to find documents using the search by subjects. In Europe, each country uses thesauri or key-word lists in its own language, whereas multilingual thesauri would be essential.

Another problem is the harmonization of software. From January to December 1997, ONE (OPAC Network in Europe) was a collaborative project involving 15 organizations in eight European countries. This project provided library users with better ways to access library OPACs (online public access catalogs) and national catalogs, and stimulated and facilitated interworking between libraries in Europe.

Because of international rules, catalog records are often much more difficult to establish today than in the past. That is why nowadays libraries often hire full-time catalogers. Because of the knowledge and the training it requires, cataloging has become a specialty in librarianship.

In a few years, catalogs on the Web will no longer be "only" a collection of records, which is often a prelude to a difficult time finding the document itself - because of the forms to fill out and the difficulties of interlibrary loans. Catalogs on the Web will give instant access to the documents on the screen. This is already true in an experimental way for a few thousands documents, but has to be progressively widened to all catalogs.

[In this chapter:]

[9.1. Print Media and the Internet / 9.2. Intellectual Property / 9.3. Multimedia Convergence / 9.4. The Information Society]

9.1. Print Media and the Internet

As shown all throughout this study, the Internet is opening new perspectives in all the sectors of the print media.

In any field (literature, sciences, technology, etc.), authors can create a website to post their works - they no longer need to wait for a publisher to distribute them. And, thanks to e-mail, communication with their readers has become much easier.

On-line booksellers are able not only to sell books published in their own country, but also sell foreign books or sell abroad, or both. The readers can read on their screen excerpts or full texts of books. Many on-line bookstores offer an extensive literary magazine with an editorial content which changes every day.

The dream of catalog managers to be able to give access to a document through its bibliographic record is no longer totally utopian. It is already the case for a few thousand works belonging to public domain. Organizations are also studying the possibility of posting commercial documents on the Web, in return for a royalty tax corresponding to the copyright rights, which could be paid by credit card.

Libraries have a new tool for letting the public know their collections better, and for developing projects for real or potential users. The Internet is also a gigantic encyclopedia, easily available for consultation by the libraries' staff and readers.

Many newspapers and magazines' latest issues are available on-line, as well as "dossiers" on current events and archives equipped with a search engine to find information from previous issues. We are also witnessing the first steps of an on-line press which would be different from the paper