Content area
Full Text
Marta Seljak: Director of Information Engineering Science, Institute of Information Science, Maribor, Slovenia, and
Tomazo Seljak: Counsellor to the Government, Ministry of Science and Technology, Maribor, Slovenia
Introduction
A number of international library projects started with an invitation to libraries to participate in co-operative programmes. Behind the magical word co-operation, shared efforts to surmount incoming problems are concentrating. Logically, this same word is a component part in the names of established programmes and projects, such as Cooperative Online Serials Program (CONSER), Name Authority Cooperative Program (NACO), Subject Authority Cooperative Program (SACO), Bibliographic Record Cooperative Program (BIBCO), Cooperative Online Resource Catalog Project (CORC), etc.
The aim of such co-operative projects is to provide the widest possible availability of bibliographic and authority records as smoothly and as economically as possible. The development and use of uniform standards is a pre-condition to achieve the aims stated.
The shared cataloguing system, through which the libraries on the territory of the former Yugoslavia started to interconnect in 1987, also followed this goal. Since the motto of the project was co-operation, the system was later renamed Cooperative Online Bibliographic System & Services (COBISS)[1]. Similarly, the letters CO also introduce the names of the following segments: COBIB union catalogue, CONOR prototype authority database, COLIB co-operating libraries database, and COMARC format.
After her participation at the annual conference of Slovenian librarians (Slovenia, Autumn 1998), Cristina Tovote from Sweden wrote an illustrative report on the results of the implementation of the COBISS system in Slovenia (Tovote, 1998): "This is something that we can envy them, this country. Slightly larger than Smaland (a province in the south of Sweden), with only two million inhabitants, it has its own national computer network - COBISS - a co-operative online bibliographic system and services - which is an invaluable help in disseminating knowledge and information among the population. It all started ten years ago, when the union catalogue was launched in three of the Slovenian libraries. At that time, the system was adopted as the union database and information support in Yugoslavia. Up to 1991, six national libraries and all larger libraries in Yugoslavia had joined the system. After 1991, Slovenia itself assumed the COBISS data collection. The role of the national host was entrusted to the...