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

V. Identification and Location 73
them to handle this additional workload it would seriously degrade
their performance as technical processing systems.
The recommended strategy, then, is to use either OCLC or
BALLOTS to construct the on-line data base of UC catalog records, as
described in Chapter VIII, but to use a different system, with different
terminals, for public searching and consultation of that data
base.
Costs. The estimated costs of the bibliographic projects proposed
are shown in Table 13. As noted, the Union Catalog and the Union List
of Serials are shown as separate projects until 1981/82, when they will
be combined into the on-line catalog project. Costs are estimated to
1987/88 in order to indicate that steady-state costs which will be incurred
from that date forward to maintain the system.
Offsetting savings in staff and efficiency are not shown, and
are included in the staffing calculations in Chapter IX. However,
staff committees at Berkeley have estimated savings at approximately
$375,000 per year for that institution alone, 19 and extending that on
a proportional basis to all campuses would indicate that the on-line
system should save about twice as much as it costs. Assuming these
savings are used for conversion of retrospective records, it should
still be possible to operate the system without net increases in
costs, once the development period is completed; certainly it would
appear that in the long run the on-line method is likely to be a
much more economical method of operation for the University's libraries
than its present card catalogs.
The development costs are admittedly large, but Baumol and
Marcus, in their landmark study of the economics of academic libraries,
caution against letting the high initial costs obscure the
long-range economic benefits:
A major impediment to a change in library operations turned
out to be the cost of the electronic equipment itself and
19 Mary Blackburn, et al., "The 'Ideal' Catalog," Berkeley, The General
Library, 1975, p. 7, and Russell Gardner et al., "Proposed Plan for
Catalog Cutoff with Access to Bibliographic Data Through On-Line and
Computer Output Microform," Berkeley, The General Library, 1975,
p. 12.