The University of California Libraries: A Plan for Development (1977)

VIII. Acquisition and Processing 131
The operator may accept a record as displayed, or modify any part of
it for his own purposes, then press a key to order cards. The cards
themselves are produced overnight at the center's facilities in Columbus,
and are then shipped to the library by mail; if cataloging
copy is needed immediately, however, it can be printed out on one of
several types of printers that can be hooked to the system. Participating
libraries now catalog over 200,000 titles a week on the system,
and almost a million and a half catalog cards are printed each week.
Symbols of libraries holding each title are also shown on the screen,
so the system can (and is) used for interlibrary loan, and (as noted
below) there are other functions planned as well.
Despite the obvious advantages--the size of the data base, the
high probability that a needed record can be found in the data base,
and the opportunity for resource-sharing with other participants-there
are problems with OCLC as well. For one thing, the very size
of the system is a disadvantage as well as an advantage. Rapid
growth has meant that the computers involved have frequently been
unable to handle the load efficiently, and "response time"--the time
between sending a command to the computer and receiving the response
on the screen, a time during which the operator is essentially idle
--has on numerous occasions risen from the "normal" seven or eight
seconds to several minutes or more. This has led to "feathering"cutting
selected participants off the air during certain periods of
the day--and moratoriums on new installations. A more serious drawback
is that there is no procedure for preventing the creation of two or
more slightly different records for the same book, either by inadvertence
or deliberately. Many of the records in the data base are
duplicates of this type, and many records are also poorly edited or
constructed, so that most users find it necessary to construct a
list of libraries whose cataloging they will accept and those they
will not.
BALLOTS also began in 1967, but until recently was used by
only one institution (Stanford University), and by only some of the
libraries at that institution. In 1975, seven public libraries began
using it on a partial basis, employing a teletype terminal to search