Library automation at the interface of the World Wide Web

Abstract

The emerging consensus seems to be that, in UK Higher Education anyway, automation of local library holdings is passing into history as a hot topic, and that the use of the Web to deliver global catalogue information constitutes the primary terrain of discussion, and area for development, in terms of automated library systems. Elsewhere in the world the issue of library automation is not so stale, but, as can be seen from Alejandro Leal Cueva's article elsewhere in this issue, the interface with the Web is still a major factor when considering and implementing automated library systems outside the First World. Even in countries like the UK, though, automating the paper catalogue is not an issue to have disappeared entirely. In the News section of the present issue of The Electronic Library is an item covering the immense job of converting and automating the 1920–1988 catalogue of the Bodleian Library in Oxford that has been carried out by OCLC. Nevertheless, the automated library, in the sense of a library whose collections are interrogated via information technology rather than bits of card or bound ledgers, does increasingly belong to the future of the recent past, it would seem.