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Unit 7: Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC)

7.4 Online Catalogues: How They Differ from Manual Catalogues? Notes

There have been some general attempts in the literature of the past decade to briefly compare
different types of library catalogues. However, these comparisons have not been concerned
with the concepts that underlie the nature and structure of the catalogue. In the following
sections, the two types of catalogue will be compared in terms of the creation, manipulation and
search/retrieval/display of bibliographic records.

7.4.1 Creation and Manipulation of Bibliographic Records

Structure and Content of Bibliographic Records

By ‘structure of the record’ is meant the bibliographic description consisting of data elements
arranged and presented in a given order, such as card catalogue formats and MARC formats. It
is generally understood that the medium, via which bibliographic records are created,
manipulated and made accessible to the searcher, influences their structure and content.
The computer has made possible the enriching of the structure and contents of bibliographic
records. While the space limitations of 3" x 5" cards generally restrict the level of data elements
to be entered in a record, the content of a bibliographic record in an online catalogue makes it
possible and desirable to include more data elements such as those fixed-length data elements
indexed in field 008 in the USMARC bibliographic format and even data such as summaries,
tables of content, and full texts. This issue has been of major interest to librarians and system
designers during the past decade and there have been some proposals in this regard. User
studies of the early 1980s showed that most users of online catalogues would like to have access
to tables of contents, back-of-the-book indexes and summaries (Matthews, Lawrence, and
Ferguson, 1983: 134). Other suggestions have included the titles of essays in collected works or
festschriften, book introductions, book jacket material, and the assignment of more subject
headings.

Did u know? With the advent and further development of online catalogues it has become
possible to assign a larger number of access points to bibliographic records. In comparison
to the conventional main and added entries in the card catalogue, any data element in a
bibliographic record may be designated as an access point.

MARC Format and Categorisation of Data Elements

As a set of standards for the identifying, storing and communicating of cataloguing information,
MARC has significantly contributed to the growth of library automation and to the development
of online catalogues. Although the MARC record was conceived as an automated version of the
catalogue card, the structure is flexible enough to store bibliographic information in more
detailed fields and subfields due to the requirements of automated systems for separate
identification of data elements. While the medium for the card catalogue is the 3" x 5 “ card with
a fixed, less flexible format, most online catalogues use MARC as a communication format for
the exchange of bibliographic information. In this regard, MARC communicates bibliographic
information with more flexibility than the card catalogue. With the machine-readable format,
in which the bibliographic information on a record has been broken down into fields and
subfields, it is possible to separately identify each data element. This approach also allows for
inclusion or exclusion of data elements for output as desired.

Based on the MARC format, bibliographic records can be created and tailored according to the
specific needs of the library without either discarding standardisation or diminishing the quality

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