Other PACS components may well include gopher client software, a WAIS client, and clients for searching vendor-provided bibliographic data bases such as Medline, the Wilson indexes, UnCover, PAIS, and ChemAbstracts. The Z39.50 information query standard will be a basic component of the PACS and will underlie the common interface. The user will have other access modes available from the workstation, such as FTP tools, Archie, World Wide Web, and the like. The PACS may not provide these directly, as their interfaces don't lend themselves to the commonality of the other tools. The definition of the records to be included will expand to include those for artifactual holdings located elsewhere, and for electronic documents located locally or elsewhere on the network.
Authority control remains an integral part of the catalog system and is automated.
This is of course the library mission. Other electronic documents will include those made available by vendors or others in non-standard or ephemeral environments, or through tools that are otherwise not appropriate for linkage through the PACS, and that require specific retrieval action by the user. Gopher sources, local and remote, will include both documents and further information locators provided at other gopher servers. Sometimes the gopher sources will be documents. Some gopher documents will be found through use of the OPAC engine but will only be retrievable through the gopher tool itself.