The ups, downs, and demise of a library circulation system

The automated circulation system discussed in this paper was in existence in the spring of 1978 when the fifteenth annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing was held. The system was not a failure in the sense that it never succeeded in becoming an operational system. It did become operational and had functioned in the Undergraduate Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for two and one-half years (from May 1976 to December 1978). The system was stopped because it was replaced by a larger computer system that could perform known item searching by author, title and author/title, in addition to performing circulation functions. The university agreed to replace the Undergraduate Library system with the larger system as part of the negotiations for hiring a new director of the University Library.published or submitted for publicatio