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

V. Identification and Location 59
• By its nature, the catalog is immobile and realistically
can exist only in one copy; hence the user must come to it, rather
than vice versa.
• The cards are subject to theft, and the thefts are difficult
to detect; that is, neither the librarian nor the user has an
obvious indication that something is not there which should be-unless
the theft is a large one, as when UCLA lost all the cards
on India.
• The cabinets and associated tables require substantial
amounts of space.
• The catalog is almost inevitably out of date, because of
the delays inherent in the manual tasks of preparing cards and filing
them.
• The process of maintaining the file is labor-intensive and
hence becomes increasingly more expensive as salaries rise.
• Perhaps more important, "card catalogs tend to become increasingly
inhospitable to large-scale change, even highly desirable
change." 3 Merely updating a single subject heading to more
modern terminology can be a very expensive proposition by the time
all of the cross-references and other parts of syndetic structure
of the catalog have been corrected.
The Need for Systemwide Bibliographic Information. For the
University of California, there are additional problems posed by
the current reliance on card catalogs as the primary device for
identification and location of material. The University has determined
that "the library holdings of all campuses should be considered
a single University collection rather than nine separate
collections," 4 but effective use of the unified collection obvious-
ly cannot be made unless users know what is in it, and where it
3 Ibid.
4 Report of the Library Policy Task Force, University of California
Library Policy to 1980-81, 1974, p. 2.