Library and Information Science

Since the initiation of the MARC tape distribution service by the Library of Congress, library activities have been influenced and many libraries have developed or are developing the MARC-based mechanized systems for their activities. In Japan several institutions have been already using MARC tapes. For example, an institution, under the support of the Ministry of Education, is distributing catalog cards from MARC tapes to the libraries of the national universities without charge.

Since 1970 Keio University library system has been implementing partly mechanized systems for technical processing activities such as the control of budget information, periodicals information, and acquisitions information. These systems are supposed to be integrated into the total system called KULIC.

Now, as the fourth one, the MARC tape utilization system is being developed. Although this system is aimed to produce catalog cards for. the time being, it will be connected functionally to other three systems by generating helpful information for their activities.

This paper describes, after mentioning MARC tapes in general, 1) the reason why Keio planned to introduce MARC tapes to the library activities, 2) characteristics of the Keio University computer system from the view-point of the MARC tape processing, 3) characteristics of the MARC tape processing in Keio University, 4) the MARC tape conversion program, 5) the catalog card print-out program, and 6) problems and failures encountered during the system development.

The unique features of this system development are the use of shift codes and the development of the new print bar.

The Keio University computer system is using UNIVAC 1106 system which is a 6-bit word machine, and in that machine library data is expressed by only upper-case letters and the limited number of the special characters. UNIVAC 1106 system has OUK 9300 as one of the terminal devices which can handle 8-bit data. So shift codes are added to the original data in UNIVAC 1106 to hold information which shows the distinction between two kinds of letters. Any processing is carried out on these data. In case of output these are converted to the usual upper- and lower-case character data by the special subroutine called AEDITO before print-out.

These converted data are printed out by means of the special print bar which was made for this purpose and has several special characters convenient for library data processing.

The MARC tape conversion program consists of two parts: a) conversion of the original data to the UNIVAC code data and insertion of the shift codes (written in assembler), b) revision of the length and starting point of each tag and the record length (written in COBOL).

The catalog card print-out program has at least two features. One is to use a new card to accomodate tracing data even though there is enough space for the data on the preceding card. This is because it may not be common to need the tracing data at the time to make the copies of these catalog data. Another feature is the unique processing of the words which are on the right end of the card and continue on the next row at the same time.