Search

A sample of 50 items in French and Italian from the Cornell University arrearage, all lacking catalog copy in the RLIN database, was searched on OCLC and in six OPACs available on the Internet: Harvard University, Indiana University, MELVYL, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Chicago, and the University of Toronto. Although catalog copy was found on OCLC for 34% of these items, searching the individual OPACs on the Internet yielded hit rates of only 2%-10%. Furthermore, the six OPACs all together provided catalog copy for only 2 of the items that did not turn up on either RLIN or OCLC.

This article outlines the development of the Houston Area Research Library Consortium's CD-ROM union catalog, presents hypotheses on the impact of the union catalog on resource sharing generally among the Consortium members and specifically with regard to the University of Houston Libraries, and examines these hypotheses in relation to the preliminary data. The examination reveals that currently available data do not support the hypotheses. The process of evaluating the data and other evidence of the catalog's effects, however, have caused the authors to reconsider the terms used to define the catalog's impact and to propose alternative avenues of investigation.

This article briefly describes ILLlNET Online, a resource sharing network for the state of Illinois. The constituency of the network, recent usage statistics, and the development of recent technological changes are discussed. Future plans are also outlined.

Effective OCLC searching is important for libraries that face budget constraints at a time of cost increases to search the OCLC database. A study was designed to determine the most effective ways to search OCLC, comparing traditional and new searches made available when PRISM was implemented, when both time and accuracy are factors. The best overall search strategy was found to be the traditional name/title (4,4) search. The new scan title search was found to be the most effective search when time is not a factor or when there are possible variations in the title entry of the item.

OCLC entered the 1990s with a bold marketing move, signalling its expansion beyond the traditional library world and into the competitive end‐user market, with the introduction of FirstSearch. In the spring of 1991, sixteen libraries throughout the United States, among them the University of New Mexico General Library, became test sites for FirstSearch. After numerous changes prompted by test site users, First‐Search (né Maximum Catalog) was officially released in October 1991. It is currently available to OCLC‐member libraries and to library schools. FirstSearch, the end‐user version of OCLC's earlier release, EPIC, inaugurates end‐user access to the largest book database in the world, OCLC's Online Union Catalog or “WorldCat,” as well as selected periodical indexes. On the first day of public release, six databases were available on FirstSearch; that number increased to 23 by August 1992 (see figure 1), and OCLC is negotiating with database producers to add others to the system.

Providing good access to library material in remote storage is the key to making the use of remote storage an acceptable option for dealing with overcrowding in libraries on prime campus land. Users' concerns with remote storage include issues such as browsability, retrieval time, and distance factors. Each of these concerns must be addressed to provide users with adequate access to stored collections. Electronic browsing can replace physical browsing. Turnaround time may be reduced with requests submitted through electronic mail, telefacsimile transmissions, and regular pickups. At the UC Southern Regional Library Facility, bibliographic access is provided by the UCLA online automated system, ORION, and the union catalog for all of the University of California, Melvyl™. The primary focus of policies and procedures at the facility is to provide quick and easy access to materials once they are stored.

OCLC Services available since 1971 are now providing access to 27 million items in 45 countries. Outlines current abilities and future developments including: PRISM AND PRISM ILL, a new telecommunications network and its ContentsFirst and ArticleFirst databases. Discusses the introduction of its document delivery service, OCLC Dispatch and Gateway access to reference services from local and campus information networks planned for 1993. OCLC has undertaken multidimensional planning to provide it with a many faceted framework to develop its resource sharing potential now and in the future.

In 1989, the existence of an online union catalogue, the National Bibliographic Database-PORBASE, raised the urgent need for mechanisms of co-operation in the field of subject authority control. A national co-operative project called CLIP (Compatibilizacao de Linguagens de Indexacao em Portugues) was launched. With CLIP special libraries will assume responsibility for the final content of the authority file with respect to terminology for subject access in different subject areas. Reference is made to the general situation in Portuguese libraries with respect to the availability and application of subject indexing tools, and also to the work being carried out towards standardization and harmonization of procedures in such matters

Three characteristics describe the bibliographic activities of the United States Newspaper Program (USNP). Participants catalog and inventory all newspapers published and held in the United States and its territories. The Program is primarily a retrospective cataloging and union list project. Newspaper files are incomplete and are scattered across the country. Defined by these characteristics, the Program has limited funds and a time in which to catalog and inventory the nation's newspapers. The Newspaper Cataloging and Union Listing Manual, the third such manual published for the United States Newspaper Program, attempts to facilitate the work of state newspaper projects characterized by the challenges of conducting a comprehensive inventory, the opportunity afforded by retrospective cataloging and union listing, and the mysteries of cataloging less-than-full runs. This article contains no information about sex. Judgement on truth is the prerogative of the reader.

The cataloging and inventory phase of the Maryland Newspaper Project began in April, 1988 and was completed in November, 1990. The purpose of this paper is to describe a particular experience in conductin a newspaper cataloging project, to i: convey ideas for managing f eld work, and to describe the method the Maryland Newspaper Project used to determine when the cataloging and inventory phase was fhshed.

Copy cataloging of serials at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is done in the OCLC cataloging unit of the Automated Services department. Matching OCLC records were found for just over 81 per cent of the serial titles searched from July 1989 through June 1990. One full-time paraprofessional is responsible for copy editing and classification A professional librarian spends approximately two hours a week in consultation with the paraprofessional to resolve complex problems. The UIUC computerized calalog, search searching routines, and serial copy editing procedures are described.

The Idaho State Historical Records Advisory Board obtained funding from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to provide statewide bibliographic access to manuscripts and archives. This paper describes the innovative features of that project, carried out by the University of Idaho library as subcontractor, including the integration of several off-the-shelf software programs into one process. The paper is slightly revised from a presentation to the Joint Conference of the Northwest Archivists and the Archives Association of British Columbia held at Western Washington University, Bellingham, Washington, 2 May 1992. The author's attendance at that conference was made possible by a grant from the Hon. John Calhoun Smith Memorial Fund of the University of Idaho.

The essay reports on the methodology and activities of a current project of the American Institute of Physics's (AIP) Center for History of Physics to enlarge the international component of its International Catalog of Sources for History of Physics and Allied Sciences (ICOS). The ICOS project identifies an institution in each foreign country to survey its repositories and send information on the location and content of collections to the AIP for cataloging, indexing, and sharing with RLIN-AMC. Comments on the impact of political upheavals and on other problems and successes are included.

The London and South Eastern Library Region (LASER) is an organisation for Library Cooperation. Its objects are the improvement of library facilities available to the public by the promotion of cooperation between libraries and other organisations. Co-operation maximises the use of scarce resources both of stock and staff expertise. Computer technology and extension into networking has allowed LASER members to make economic and multiple use of bibliographic records as well as stocks of books and periodicals. The use of internationally recognised standards also makes links with other cooperative organisations a practical possibility.

OCLC entered a new phase of information delivery with the introduction of EPIC in 1990 and FirstSearch in 1991. Both systems are designed for use in public services: EPIC by librarians, FirstSearch by library patrons. EPIC functions like other traditional online services on the market, both in terms of searching and pricing. In contrast, FirstSearch incorporates innovative searching and pricing features that set it apart from traditional online search systems. Both offer access to the vast OCLC Online Union Catalog. This article will analyze the similarities and differences, strengths and weaknesses of the two new OCLC services

Recent developments in Portuguese libraries are described with special attention to the application of new information technologies. The obvious modernisation largely described in the LIB‐2 update study has been mainly due to the automation of the National Library and the creation of the Online Union Catalogue. Main aspects and stages of this process which revolutionised Portuguese libraries are therefore emphasised.

Rich collections of conference proceedings are available in major science and technology (S & T) libraries in India. Unfortunately, no bibliographic tool is available to provide access to these information sources at national/regional level at present. Recognising this fact, Indian National Scientific Documentation Centre (INSDOC) has set up a project of creating a database and publishing a union catalogue of S & T conference proceedings available within the country. In the first phase, 30 major research and development institutions in the city of Bangalore, South India have been covered and the first volume of the union catalogue was published in 1991. It is printed using a desktop publishing system and the database is available on Unesco's CDS/ISIS mini‐micro version 2.3.

This paper gives an overview of developments in the Pica Library Network to further the integration of both local and central library functions. It explains the use and possibilities of the emergin...

ILLINET Online, Illinois's powerful online catalog and resource sharing network, is extensive enough to be considered a rival to OCLC as a source for preorder citation verification. This study was undertaken to determine if a sizeable percentage of the titles that are presently being verified on OCLC prior to ordering at Western Illinois University Library could be verified at the time of order on the ILLINET Online database instead. A sample issue of the Processing Information List, a biweekly listing of titles on order or in process at WIU, was selected to provide the study sample. From this list of OCLC verified titles, approximately 10 percent were checked on ILLINET Online to see if they were included in the statewide database at the time of order. The study revealed that 80.2% of the titles could have been verified without cost on the ILLINET Online system. Problem areas were predictable: foreign language titles, foreign imprint titles, nonbook materials, dissertations, and very recent publications. However, time and money could be saved if the ILLINET database substituted for OCLC in pre-order verification.

This entry describes the history, governance, and current activities and plans of OCLC Online Computer Library Center, a nonprofit, membership, computer library service, and research organization dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world's information and reducing library costs. OCLC and its member libraries cooperatively produce and maintain WorldCat�the OCLC Online Union Catalog

This article examines the complex changes that have occurred in Polish academic libraries, focusing on University of Warsaw Library (UWL) after the fall of communism in 1989. An accelerated transformation of libraries begun shortly after the initiation of political and economical changes and was sped up by the series of grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation followed by Polish government funds. The library automation was the first major task for libraries. In preparation for automation the first in Poland authority file was created and thus the process of introducing and following international standards of bibliographic description in the climate of interlibrary cooperation had begun. As a part of transformation the open stacks and the Library of Congress classification were introduced for the first time in Poland in a newly constructed UWL building. A crowning achievement of transformation is the first Polish union catalog called, Narodowy Uniwersalny Katalog Centralny (NUKAT) launched in 2002.

Purpose – This paper aims to discuss the findings of recent surveys conducted around SUNCAT, the Serials Union Catalogue for the UK research community and the implications for the development of the service.Design/methodology/approach – The results of two surveys are discussed: the first, a short print survey with a small group of inter-library loan librarians, and the second, an online survey open to all SUNCAT users.Findings – SUNCAT is used by both end users and a wide range of library and information professionals for a variety of purposes. The current level of satisfaction with the service is good but desirable developments include adding the serials' holdings data of more libraries, reducing the duplication on the catalogue and adding links to further information.Research limitations/implications – The findings are based on responses from mainly library and information professionals, with limited input from end users.Originality/value – The paper focuses on SUNCAT, which is the most comprehensive source of serials' holdings information in the UK.

To determine the feasibility of our library providing full cataloging for textbooks using OCLC, I conducted a study of records in the OCLC data base and performed a literature search on the topic. I found that a preponderance of duplicate OCLC records and a lack of uniformity in cataloging practices would make this a costly proposition. It would also make it difficult to train a paraprofessional to select catalog records and to handle the cataloging of these materials. This paper suggests standards to be considered by the appropriate ALA committees in order to alleviate the duplication of records and to make textbook cataloging easier.

Oliver W. Holmes propounded the concept of archival levels of arrangement in his 1964 article, "Five Levels of Arrangement," which described practices at the National Archives. Over the years the concept has been elevated to a theoretical construct and has been extended to include description as well as arrangement. However, descriptive systems that actually apply the concepts of levels of arrangement and description have been few and far between. Neither standard reporting to the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections nor the development of the MARC Archival and Manuscripts Control format have furthered the integration of description at differing levels. Holmes's levels seem to have had little impact on the development of automated archival systems. Has the theory been invalidated or just denied?

Responding to an expressed need for computerized periodical indexes, the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries (CARL) introduced UnCover, an online article access database, providing access to the contents of the serials held by member libraries. This study presents the rcsults of a survey taken at the University of Denver's Penrose Library that assesses the impact of this database on the use of current periodicals.

From 1913 to 1975, the American Medical Association's Department of Investigation assembled more than 300 cubic feet of files on health fraud, quackery, "patent" medicines, and alternative medicine. In 1988, the AMA obtained a grant from the National Library of Medicine to process and catalog these materials, now known as the Historical Health Fraud and Alternative Medicine Collection. Using Minaret software (a stand-alone USMARC AMC cataloging system) in combination with WordPerfect word-processing software, the project staff developed procedures that allowed it to generate textual and index entries for the printed guide to the collection as well as upload USMARC AMC records directly to the OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) union catalog.

Belgium has a longstanding and rich tradition in library automation from the beginning in the late 1960s to the present day. Unlike, for instance, the Netherlands, it has no national centre for library automation such as PICA. Library automation in Belgium followed more or less the same richly diversed pattern as in Great Britain.

A summary of a report to UNESCO with the results of a study examining various aspects of interlending and document supply throughout Europe. Examines the size and nature of collections available for interlending, the state of union catalogues and the use of new technology. Concludes that there is considerable disparity in practice and development throughout Europe with differences in financial and professional practices and uneven development of union catalogues.

The Union Catalog (UC) of Taiwan was established to provide an integrated search service for millions of digital objects distributed in the databases of different institutions. The main challenge is how to continuously and consistently manage large quantities of data. XML technologies have already been recommended for greater data preservation rather than database systems. In addition, we assume that a database design in our case would be complex and that consistent maintenance would be difficult. For this reason, databases are not used as the primary storage mechanism of the UC. Although the UC adopts an XML-centric architecture, it has difficulty handling data queries, data modification, and category listing efficiently. In this paper, we discuss how we use XML technologies to implement the UC system, and how we solve the issues arising from XML's limitations.

Compte-rendu de la creation d'un catalogue collectif sur disque compact par l'ACLCP (Associated College Libraries of Central Pennsylvania), grâce a une subvention du Ministere de l'Education des Etats-Unis: planification, decisions administratives, conception des banques de donnees des 17 bibliotheques membres de l'association, preparation d'un test du catalogue

Reports on the problems faced by Harvard College Library (made up of several smaller libraries) while implementing its online union catalog. Observes that their use of the CAT CD450 systems′ advanced indexing features coupled with its ease of use cut search costs considerably. Looks at the menuing system created, and the batch files that underpin the system.

A market survey was administered to determine OCLC users' perceptions of record quality in the Online Union Catalog. Questions were asked about the seriousness of errors encountered in records used in normal catalogin operations. Information concerning users' preferences for future data quality activities was elicited with proposals for possible changes in policy and procedures. Users were also asked about their perceptions of how well existing rograms addressed quality control needs. Possible explanations for survey responses are given with a review of activities designed to address the identified user needs.

The traditional library organization for over forty years has been divided into technical services and public services. The age of automation, however, is bringing these two areas much closer together, and in some large academic libraries, the technical services librarian and the public services librarian are the same person. The work done in serials acquisitions and collection development is now available online in many libraries. Several libraries also have automated serials control and cataloging capabilities. With the advent of online access to serials, reference, interlibrary loan and library instruction services have simplified the work demands for the reference librarian. This conclusion suggests that cooperation between technical services and public services is the logical solution to provide the best possible service to the library patron.

Book announcements in the health sciences and in fiction were used as samples to observe the presence of bibliographic records and to monitor the rate of addition of institution symbols in the OCLC Online Union Catalog. Preliminary results indicate that, for the vast majority of titles, records already existed in the Online Union Catalog when the title was announced. The rates of addition of holding libraries suggest that libraries used the health science titles in an essentially linear manner, while added locations for the fiction titles follow an exponential curve.

VCenter, a platform for broadcasting digital video content, was developed by the National Digital Archives Program (NDAP), Taiwan. The platform provides a number of functions, such as digital video archiving, format transformation, streaming broadcasts, editing, geotagging, and blogging. The concept of Web2.0 is conducted in VCenter to increase user participation and improve interaction between the system and the user. For videos, VCenter adopts Flash technology because it has a multi-layer architecture and it can handle multimedia content. We can add watermarks or captions as layers to videos without changing the original video's content so that when users browse videos, the multi-layer overlaps the original video layer in real-time. VCenter serves the Union Catalog system of NDAP as a video broadcasting platform. In addition to archiving the valuable videos of NDAP, it allows the general public to archive, broadcast, and share digital videos.

Union catalogues have had an important place in libraries for many years. Their use has been little investigated. Recent interest in the relative merits of physical and virtual union catalogues and a recent collaborative project between a physical and several virtual union catalogues in the United Kingdom led to the opportunity to study how users use and view union catalogues and to consider the views of librarians towards union catalogues. The research reported here used a mix of recorded searches, interviews and focus groups to understand user behaviour and views of union catalogues. The findings revealed a diversity of search approaches, the influence of the Web on user expectations and an almost complete lack of awareness of union catalogues on the part of potential users.

The printed version of the China National Bibliography was first published in 1987 and ceased to be published in 1994. It is replaced by the online services provided by the National Library of China. Because of the present situation of legal deposit policies in China, the national bibliography has narrow coverage. There is another kind of ‘national bibliography’ with wider coverage, but not done by librarians. In China, there are also problems of different forms of name authorities and different MARC records. The National Library of China is considering a National Union Catalogue to improve the national bibliographical services.

The University of California, Berkeley and the University of Liverpool in conjunction with the San Diego Supercomputer Center are developing a framework for Grid-Based Digital Library systems and Information Retrieval Services (Cheshire3) that operates in both single-processor and distributed computing environments. In this paper we discuss some results of testing Grid-based parallel approaches in indexing and retrieval for a variety of information resources, ranging from small test collections like the TREC and INEX collections, to medium-scale metadata collections like Medline and a test version of University of California Online Union Catalog, MELVYL (with 15 million and 16.5 million records respectively) ranging up to large-scale collections like the US National Records and Archives Administration (NARA) Preservation Prototype. This paper examines our approaches to indexing and retrieving from these collections and the architecture of the system that supports them.

Constructing a Chinese digital library, especially for a historical article archiving, is often bothered by the small character sets supported by the current computer systems. This paper is aimed at resolving the unencoded character problem with a practical and composite approach for Chinese digital libraries. The proposed approach consists of the glyph expression model, the glyph structure database, and supporting tools. With this approach, the following problems can be resolved. First, the extensibility of Chinese characters can be preserved. Second, it would be as easy to generate, input, display, and search unencoded characters as existing ones. Third, it is compatible with existing encoding schemes that most computers use.This approach has been utilized by organizations and projects in various application domains including archeology, linguistics, ancient texts, calligraphy and paintings, and stone and bronze rubbings. For example, in Academia Sinica, a very large full-text database of ancient texts called Scripta Sinica has been created using this approach. The Union Catalog of National Digital Archives Project (NDAP) dealt with the unencoded characters encountered when merging the metadata of 12 different thematic domains from various organizations. Also, in Bronze Inscriptions Research Team (BIRT) of Academia Sinica, 3,459 Bronze Inscriptions were added, which is very helpful to the education and research in historic linguistics.

Possivelmente, tanto no âmbito do estudo, do ensino, da pesquisa, como da simples busca de informações sobre artes, há interesse de saber sobre periódicos especializados nesse campo. Com o objetivo de identificá-los, foi desenvolvida uma pesquisa, utilizando como fonte de informação o Catálogo Coletivo Nacional de Publicações Seriadas – CCN. Como resultado da mesma, apresenta-se uma relação dos periódicos referentes aos idiomas português, espanhol, inglês, francês, italiano, alemão e holandês, que possuem algum fascículo editado no ano 2000 e/ou anos subseqüentes em acervo de alguma das bibliotecas nacionais informantes do sistema. Além dos títulos dos periódicos, e respectivos ISSN, são fornecidos dados sobre a procedência regional ou nacional dos mesmos, abrangência de assuntos, e ano de edição do 1º fascículo. Abstract There is a possible interest in knowing about specialized serials in arts, both in the scope of study and research and in a simple search of information about arts. With the purpose of identify them it was developed a search using as source of information the Brazilian Union Catalog of Serials – CCN. As a result of the study, it is presented a list of serials in Portuguese, Spanish, English, French, Italian, German and Dutch, which has one or more issue edited in 2000 and/or following years, in the collection of the libraries, which feed the system. Besides the serials titles and respective ISSN, it is provided data about the regional or national origin of them, subject scope and year of publication of the first issue.

PurposeDetail research undertaken to determine the key differences in the performance of certain centralised (physical) and distributed (virtual) bibliographic catalogue services, and to suggest strategies for improving interoperability and performance in, and between, physical and virtual models.Design/methodology/approachMethodically defined searches of a centralised catalogue service and selected distributed catalogues were conducted using the Z39.50 information retrieval protocol, allowing search types to be semantically defined. The methodology also entailed the use of two workshops comprising systems librarians and cataloguers to inform suggested strategies for improving performance and interoperability within both environments.FindingsTechnical interoperability was permitted easily between centralised and distributed models, however, the various individual configurations permitted only limited semantic interoperability. Significant prescription in cataloguing and indexing guidelines, greater participation in the program for collaborative cataloguing, consideration of future functional requirements for bibliographic records migration, and greater disclosure to end users are some of the suggested strategies to improve performance and semantic interoperability.Practical implicationsThis paper not only informs the library and information science research community and union catalogue administrators, but also has numerous practical implications for those establishing distributed systems based on Z39.50 and search/retrieve web services as well as those establishing centralised systems.Originality/valueThe paper moves the discussion of Z39.50‐based systems away from anecdotal evidence and provides recommendations based on testing, and is intimately informed by the UK cataloguing and systems librarian community.

Numerous papers have addressed building Union Catalog (UC) technologies, such as metadata schema, data exchange (e.g., OAI-PMH, Z39.50), and resource classification. In contrast to these approaches, in this article, we focus on UC technologies that leverage resource utilization across digital resources. We take the repositories of Taiwan's National Digital Archives Program (NDAP) in Taiwan as the project content to identify major resource utilization issues. Our solution methodologies include resource unification, information query, information navigation, and unencoded character handling.

Περιέχει το πλήρες κείμενο The structure, operation and development phases of the Hellenic Interlibrary Loan Network (HILL-net) are described and the pros and cons of the model, as well as the conclusions after nine years of operation are reported. The HILL-net has been the first systematic collaborative activity among Hellenic libraries. After the shift of most member libraries to the digital era, the HILL-net is coexisting, in a symbiotic and complementary way, with access to electronic journals. The network started its pilot operation in 1994, initially with six member-libraries. It currently consists of 127 member-libraries, located in Greece (including one in Cyprus). The network is based on a radial model with all peripheral libraries connected through the internet to a central Union Catalogue of Periodicals, installed on the server of the National Documentation Centre (NDC) in Athens. The system provides online search capabilities to the database of the Union Catalogue and offers facilities of online document ordering of articles included in the journal collections of the member libraries. Delivery of documents is carried out by the “supplier” libraries to “customer” libraries via ordinary mail or fax, and occasionally via e-mail. The clearance of transaction costs is carried out centrally by the NDC for all libraries, thus simplifying financial logistics. A migration of the system from a main-frame host computer system to a web based platform on Oracle environment took place in 1999.

On August 26, 1971, OCLC introduced the online union catalog and shared cataloging system. During the 1970s, OCLC focused its efforts on creating and expanding the online cataloging system and telecommunications network. It added an online interlibrary loan system in 1979. In the 1980s, OCLC began adapting distributed computing and microcomputing technologies as its product and service lines expanded to some 60 offerings. The organization also began looking at ways to move beyond bibliography by furnishing information not only to library staffs, but also to library patrons. In the 1990s, OCLC launched a new core business in reference services. (Smith, 1998, pp. 251–252). Now, in the 21st century, OCLC is introducing tools, services and infrastructure to manage the life cycle of digital content in libraries.

Proseguono i lavori riguardanti il progetto MAI, il catalogo collettivo virtuale delle biblioteche italiane, frutto della collaborazione tra il CILEA e l'Associazione Italiana Biblioteche e rilasciato nel maggio 1999. Questi due anni permettono di fare già qualche verifica anche per quanto riguarda l'interesse suscitato, messo in evidenza dall'utilizzo che ha raggiunto le 5.000 richieste d'uso al giorno. Sono una decina i collaboratori attualmente partecipanti, che utilizzano una lista di discussione via e-mail, e gestiscono la banca dati dei cataloghi italiani, con i cui dati viene aggiornato il Repertorio dei Cataloghi in linea Italiani. MAI ha sfruttato appieno le caratteristiche del software Azalai, il MetaOPAC realizzato dal CILEA, e oggi l'interrogazione cumulativa raggiunge più di 140 cataloghi simultaneamente. Sono state sviluppate altre due interfacce di ricerca con caratteristiche di amichevolezza, ed in collaborazione con il Coordinamento Nazionale Biblioteche di Architettura è stato realizzato MAIA, il catalogo collettivo virtuale delle biblioteche di Architettura, un'applicazione specialistica attiva su una cinquantina di cataloghi specializzati del settore.

This presentation was prepared for the session "Towards integrated resource discovery and seamless access to hybrid materials." This topic is of particular interest to RLG (Research Libraries Group) because the organization has a long and abiding interest in working to provide integrated access to research information from museums, libraries, and archives. What is RLG? RLG is a non-profit consortium of over 160 research institutions from 15 different countries. Included are major universities, national libraries and archives, major museums, and other special kinds of historical collections. The mission of RLG is to collaboratively improve access to information that supports research and learning. The two major streams of activity in this regard include programs and projects that address problems shared by a number of institutions, and the creation of information discovery and delivery services. Member programs and projects are designed to develop solutions to problems in the area of access and preservation of research materials. Types of activities in this area are standards development, creation of guidelines and best practices for description, particularly in the area of unique or primary materials. Often the work of member task groups will result in the fuller development and implementation of online services. The RLG Union Catalog was initially the product solely of member institutions pooling their resources so they could share cataloging information. It now includes data from hundreds of libraries around the world. Two resources that have recently been developed in this way are RLG Archival Resources and RLG Cultural Materials and those are the focus of this presentation.