Domsa Károlyné, Fekete Gézáné, Kovács Mária (szerk.): Gondolatok a könyvtárban / Thoughts in the Library (A MTAK közleményei 30. Budapest, 1992)
KÖNYVTÁR ÉS KORSZERŰSÉG – LIBRARY AND MODERNITY
M. B. Line It would be possible to go one better, and put the actual indexes of books on to film or disc. The user could then call up the indexes of likely books and see whether they had material of relevance to him. (This would incidentally reduce the number of books requested unnecessarily on interlibrary loan in the hope that they might contain something of interest.) This procedure would be better than entering the indexes of different books into one huge database for direct searching of entries. For one thing, the file would be almost unusable because of inconsistencies of indexing and vast numbers of entries under certain headings; for another, the keyboarding that would be necessary for character encoding would be far more costly than scanning the pages digitally. In this ideal future system the user's first stop would be the local catalogue, supported and supplemented in turn by (1) the comprehensive database, (2) the file of contents pages, and (3) the file of indexes. No publisher or database producer could be expected to take the risk of initiating a comprehensive project on the above lines. However, it is not unreasonable to hope that an experiment could be undertaken in a particular field, say books in criminology published in the last five years. 3 Access to documents has been improving faster than bibliographic access. This has been due entirely to the application of electronic technology. The automation of union catalogues and the catalogues of major research libraries, and online access to them, has given wider and wider exposure to the contents of a larger and larger number of libraries. Requests can be sent to them instantaneously by computer, and responses can be sent back equally quickly in the case of unavailability or delay. What happens after that is still open to improvement. If items are sent by mail, supply can be slow and unreliable. It must also be said that many libraries do not handle requests from users in other libraries with anything approaching the urgency of requests from their own users. Unless they do, we shall not see really fast supply times under any system, and the acceptance by libraries of this responsibility must be a prime aim. One way of helping to achieve this is to introduce a scheme whereby the full direct costs of supply are charged to requesting libraries, so that they are under an obligation to give a good service, and moreover cannot make the excuse of financial inability to provide it. In any case, there is no reason why supplying libraries should pay, any more than booksellers pay for the books they supply to libraries. For books, or any items that cannot be copied (that is, anything over 20 or 30 pages), it is hard to see what more can be done unless mail systems improve. However, for journal articles electronic technology is coming to our aid again, in the form of telefacsimile. The CCTV Group 3 machines that are in general use at present are too slow, and the copy they produce is of too poor quality, to make 170 Thoughts in the library"
