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

132 The University of California Libraries
the data base. Other libraries have been added since that time, some
using teletype equipment and others using visual display terminals
through the TYMNET commercial communications system, or over regular
telephone lines. In 1977, there were 33 institutions using the system
to one degree or another.
The data base for the system consists primarily of MARC records
and records added by Stanford's cataloging staff. Until July 1976,
shared cataloging was not possible, because the system could not
accept and store records from other institutions. Beginning in that
month, however, UC Berkeley became the first library outside Stanford
to make use of the system on a shared cataloging basis, adding records
to the file and (through the use of a program contributed by the University
of California's Universitywide Library Automation Program)
receiving catalog records in return, much as in the OCLC system. By
1977, 24 libraries were on-line to BALLOTS, cataloging approximately
5,000 titles per week.
The greatest strength of the BALLOTS system is its ability to
allow searching by a wide variety of data elements, using so-called
"natural language"--that is, the actual words of a title or author,
or truncated portions of them--and to combine these elements with
other data elements in a "Boolean" search technique, as described
in Chapter V. Subject searches can also be made, a capacity that
OCLC as not yet incorporated. Like OCLC, however, BALLOTS also has
its problems. It, too, has occasionally been plagued with poor response
time, although in the case of BALLOTS this stems from a different
source which is itself a problem: the fact that the system
must share a large computer which at any one time is processing a
number of other jobs for Stanford University. The size of the data
base is much smaller than OCLC's, although academic libraries that
have used both find almost as high a percentage of records desired
in BALLOTS as in OCLC. As BALLOTS has emerged to network status,
its costs have been difficult to pinpoint, and only recently have
libraries been able to obtain firm prices in library terms--that is,
per catalog card or title cataloged. New rates were announced in
July 1976, however, and as the system develops its network organization
and equipment this situation may be expected to stabilize.