COMPUTER APPLICATIONS TO BOOK CATALOGS AND LIBRARY SYSTEMS

Librarians must look to the future information needs of a coun-try expanding in population, technology and educational requirements. The "information explosion " is placing an additional strain on exist-ing methods of providing information rapidly and economically. A library seeking to develop a modern information retrieval program has many existing services from which to choose. The prob-lem is to define the program that will best serve the present library users and leave room for flexible action in the future, and then to pick a combination of services that best match these objectives. Documentation Incorporated (Doc Inc) of Bethesda, Maryland, was founded in 1952 by the late Dr. Mortimer Taube, and has been engaged in developing modern information retrieval systems for government and industry. A key concept that is now emerging is the development of mechanized or computerized data banks. This data bank concept is a plan for organizing a single set of data for produc-ing many products. The traditional library card catalog or data bank, long the key to finding materials in the nation's libraries, today is getting competition from book catalogs. Using data bank techniques to keep a library catalog updated, Doc Inc computer systems generate printouts of the catalog which are used to produce bound books for distribution to library users. In effect, the book catalogs are carry-ing the traditional card catalog, literally, into the homes and offices of users instead of requiring them to trek to the library to find out if the information they want is available. The computer is used to produce several indexes (such as subject, author, and title) in vari-ous formats from a single file of data and is particularly effective if the catalog data bank is standardized. Despite the wide variety of ways libraries catalog books, most differences are variations of the Library of Congress cataloging sys-tem. By using the LC catalog system as a basis or standard fo