Retrospective Conversion Revisited, Part 1.

Discusses the importance of library databases to online public access catalogs (OPAC). View that databases should only have to be created once, because having to re-create a bibliographic datebase or reconstruct it will be costly for an institution; Observation that libraries are often tempted to take shortcuts in creating the database because they use bibliographic utilities and other sources of machine-readable cataloging records; Use of a national bibliographic utility by a college library for current cataloging and retrospective conversion; Situation in which a library consortium merged machine-readable records from all of its members for a microfiche union catalog.