Ten years later: a retrospective prospectus

The invitation to write this article presents an opportunity to revisit prognostications that Clifford Lynch and I made in 1983 in our article "Online Catalogs: Through a Glass Darkly." (1) In that essay we sought to make generalizations and offer speculations. We wrote: "Some of these may seem outrageous; some will undoubtedly prove incorrect." All in all, however, what we foresaw based on the collective experience at the Division of Library Automation (DLA) has proved to be accurate and properly oriented, if not leading, toward the future of library automation. By 1983 1 had seen monumental barriers in library service between patrons and their access to informative materials. Ten years earlier, I had attended a lecture by David Besterman, who declared that if at that time he had needed to depend on the library service of that day he could not reproduce his Bibliography of Bibliographies. Even at libraries where the stacks were not closed, the bibliographic apparatuses were so fragmentary and inconsistent as to prevent the compilation of an exhaustive bibliography. Shortly before writing "Through a Class Darkly," I visited a prestigious university library in the Midwest. My host asked if there was any book that I would like to see. I requested Michael Faradays Experimental Researches in Electricity, a book that had been stolen from every library in which I previously had attempted to find it. My host escorted me to the rare book room. There I found the two-volume set--four copies of it. Later, while being shown the library's new online catalog, complete with personal computer front-end, I discovered at a citation to Experimental Researches in Electricity was not in the catalog. My host explained that no rare books or manuscripts were represented in the "public" catalog: If casual readers knew that the library had such materials, they would want to use them, and these materials were available only to veteran scholars. I was reminded once again of Besterman's comments. Even before hearing Besterman's admonition, I had learned much about the conscious building of barriers between readers and libraries" prized materials from having worked for major research libraries in New York City. However, when the quest for Faradays famous work was finally over, I realized fully for the first time that the first measure of a library's success was the size of its collection, not the quality of its service. It had also become apparent that because of OPACs the measure of a library's success was shifting from building collections to providing access. And, as we would suggest in "Through a Glass Darkly," there was real potential for delivering images of documents via the OPAC, thus preserving the collection and providing substantially enhanced service to the user, but also creating some daunting copyright-related problems. CATALOGING FOR ACCESS I remember vividly a University of California (UC) Library Council meeting in 1980, when there was an earnest debate over inclusion of subject access in the still-developing online union catalog, yet to be named MELVYL. The prevailing wisdom was that a union catalog was used for known-item searching and that subject access therefore would be a waste of university resources. Since the code for subject access already had been written for a separate project and this code could be used for keyword subject access in the online system, the debate ended for the moment. A study of online catalog use sponsored by the Council on Library Resources (CLR) finally put the issue to rest. (2) The study showed that in an online environment, searching for unknown items was very common. However, because subject analysis was designed for cardboard and not for online databases, there remain to this day major deficiencies, which we discussed in "Through a Glass Darkly." Since then, there have been successful projects to enrich access to books by chapter-level indexing and even including terms from the back-of-the-book index. …