Trends in Automation in American Academic Libraries: Ohio University's Experience

Abstract

Three decades of applications of information technology and library automation at Ohio University are chronicled in this paper. The first major development highlighted is the founding of OCLC (the Ohio College Library Center) as a cooperative cataloging device in the 1960s. OCLC's growth is traced from when it was a small organization of two staff members with a $67,000 budget and serving 54 libraries in 1967, to a complex independent organization employing 885 people with a budget of $95.7 million and a growing membership of 9,400 libraries in 1988. Featured accomplishments of the 1970s include OCLC's successful online interlibrary loan system, which has received an estimated 20 million requests from its 1979 inception to 1988. A major development at Ohio University during the 1980s is the ALICE system, an online locally integrated library system which interfaces with OCLC (now the OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc.) for online shared cataloging and interlibrary loans. ALICE offers an online public access catalog, acquisitions, circulation, and serials control. Based on the Virginia Tech Library System (VTLS) software, ALICE uses microwave and telephone lines to serve libraries at five regional campuses in a network mode. Other advancements include: (1) the growth of online database searching; (2) expanding nonprint collections that include new formats; and (3) growing use of CD-ROM based information. A new development foreseen for the 1990s is a statewide information system to facilitate library resource sharing. Five diagrams accompany the text. (13 references) (SD)