The changes are being made primarily to allow libraries to more easily predict search costs and to remember prices across databases. They were increased for 11 databases. Record-display prices, which varied widely, will increase somewhat for most databases. Prices for most databases added since January 1993 have followed the new pricing standard. Copies of the new EPIC price list are available from OCLC-affiliated regional networks or OCLC reference services.
Gopher is an example of a commonly used protocol for searching networked information.
Although the use of networked information is proliferating at an astounding rate and is providing unprecedented access to information, the organization of this information has not kept up with its use. Likewise, there is need for a greater understanding of information searching in order to design better searching tools, organize networked information more effectively, and assist information providers in the mounting of networked sources. There has been little research on how people use Gopher, or its effectiveness as a searching tool. The proposed project will study Gopher users' information searching behavior, identify patterns and problems in the searching behavior or with the information retrieval, and recommend changes for improvement. The methodology employed will be descriptive survey research of a random sample of bibliographic families from the Online Union Catalog and qualitative examination of the most complex families to assess the efficacy of the conceptual model.