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Unit 7: Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC)

of Congress Filing Rules developed by John Rather, and the rules developed by the British Notes
Library Filing Committee are among the most important. Although developments in filing
rules have been strongly in the direction of common sense and are oriented toward the intelligent
user (Rather, 1972), users actually have major problems in identifying the exact location of a
heading in the sequential order of a large card catalogue.
In a manual system, filing is flexible and can be executed according to the order which seems
desirable to the catalogue user, whereas, in a computer catalogue, it must follow the logic of the
computer. Filing in a manual system follows the principle of file as if: that is, the form and order
in which access points are arranged is according to the interpretation of the librarian with the
supposition that the arrangement would be the most desirable to the user. For instance, the
number 3 can be filed as if it were the word three. The use of the computer has influenced filing
practices and it is generally agreed that the principle of file as is, which is necessitated by the
introduction of computer filing, has more validity in the computer environment (Byrum and
Hinton, 1979: 180; Gorman, 1979: 135; Malinconico, 1980: 33). This principle states that characters
or words should be filed as they are and not as if they were something else; for example, the
number ‘3’ as 3, and ‘three’ as three.
This realisation of the logical as well as the practical differences between filing in a manual
catalogue and a computer catalogue came with the earliest attempts in the application of computers
to bibliographical work. Current filing rules, which were developed for manual systems, proved
not to be effective in a computer environment.
Users of online catalogues can encounter many problems when searching for bibliographic
information. Due to different software specifications, computer-based filing has not been entirely
standardised and the burden of thinking, for example, about the exact form of access points and
the way punctuation and non-alphabetic symbols are treated is left to the user. In manual filing
it is possible, by a simple convention, to ignore stop words such as ‘the’, ‘and’, ‘of’, ‘a’, ‘an’, etc.
at the beginning of titles whereas, in the computer catalogue, this issue demands special
programming and in some cases they are difficult to handle (for example, if the stop word is a
necessary part of the title and is not to be ignored).

7.4.3 Searching, Retrieval and Display of Bibliographic Records

User Interfaces

A significant difference between the online catalogue and the card catalogue comes at the stage
in which the user interacts with the catalogue, i.e., bibliographic records can be searched, retrieved
and displayed. Online catalogues are here considered to be a great departure from card catalogues
and it seems that there will be more developments in this regard in the near future.
While the card catalogue is a self-evident medium with a clear physical existence, the online
catalogue is not revealed to the users and is not easy to grasp in their first interactions with it. In
an online environment, the user cannot immediately understand the catalogue or its structure,
coverage and searching mechanisms unless he/she interacts with the system and tries different
options for searching and displaying of bibliographic information. Despite these limitations of
the online catalogue, users show a high degree of satisfaction with the variety of features and
capabilities it has at the output stage.

Searching and Retrieval Capabilities

With regard to searching capabilities, the online catalogue is a significant departure from
traditional library catalogues. One of its most interesting features and a major advantage over
the card catalogue is the ability of the user to search for the needed item in a variety of ways that

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