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Rahmatollah Fattahi: University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
ACKNOWLEDGMENT: The author acknowledges his thanks to Dr Jack R. Nelson, Universityof New South Wales School of Information, Library and Archive Studies,and to Mrs Eugenie Greig for their invaluable comments on the contentsof this article.
The approach, scope and goal of the comparison
In making a comparison between the online catalogue and the manual catalogue, it seems appropriate to choose the card catalogue among the other forms of manually used catalogues (printed book, sheaf, computer-produced book catalogues, and computer-output microform (COM) catalogues) as the best approach, because: the card catalogue has been and still is one of the most important and widely-used manual systems; the design of current cataloguing codes has been based on the concept of the card catalogue, and online catalogues are logical successors to the card catalogue.
It should be noted that online catalogues and card catalogues can be compared from different perspectives and according to different criteria. There have been some attempts in the literature of the past decade (for example[1,2, 3,4]) to compare different types of library catalogues and to give some insights to librarians in the transitional period from manual to automated catalogues. In this study the differences between the online and the card catalogue will therefore be explored in the input/manipulation/output processes of bibliographic data.
A realistic approach in comparing the online with the card catalogue should reveal both advantages and disadvantages in both catalogues. This will lead to a better understanding of the present implications for the bibliographic record in the online environment. The comparison will help identify the differences in the processes by which a bibliographic record, and on a larger scale a catalogue, is created, manipulated and made accessible to catalogue users for searching and retrieval. A thorough understanding of both conceptual and technical differences between the online catalogue and the card catalogue, as well as an identification of the advantages and disadvantages of each, will help identify aspects in which cataloguing codes are relevant to the interactive online catalogue.
Structure and content of the record
By "structure of the record" is meant the bibliographic description consisting of data elements arranged and presented in a given order, such as card catalogue formats and MARC formats[ 5,...