Full text retrieval of documents identified in on-line library catalogs via internet
Authors: M. A. Plank
Venue: Proceedings of the 17th annual ACM SIGUCCS conference on User Services (1989)

In an effort to address issues of user access and retrieval of full-text files, the University of Maryland at College Park (UMCP) and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) are collaborating on a project to retrieve full text of documents using online library catalogs via Internet. Both organizations share a concern for the integration into the electronic environment of heretofore paperbased information. The amount of information with which libraries must deal is rapidly outpacing libraries' abilities to acquire, catalog, store and retrieve it. Creative alternatives must be found to capitalize on technological opportunities for sharing among libraries to the benefit of the nation's scholars. This project builds cooperative links between campus libraries and computer centers, and between campus libraries on geographically distant campuses using the nation's academic computing network facilities. It begins a serious process of developing and evaluating appropriate techniques for sharing primary content material among the nation's research libraries. This project will also focus on issues specific to full-text network access, particularly identifying technology needs and standards options. It will take a pragmatic view, recognizing not only the desire and intent to operate over an ISO-OSI network eventually, but also the current existence of a large academic network using the TCP-IP protocols. Attention will need to be placed on annotation the MARC bibliographic record appropriately to identify cataloged items for which full-text is available. The choice of standards for storage and delivery of full-text is also an issue, for which several options warrant attention (e.g., Group 4 FAX, Display PostScript, and Standard Graphic Mark-up Language). This project will be among the first to demonstrate that users needing bibliographic and full-text information can satisfy their needs over Internet. The placement in the MARC bibliographic record on local online library systems and OCLC of the instructions for accessing the full text and the development of software to assist in retrieving the full text is an innovative approach to library service. University-generated technical reports will be the documents used in this project. These locally produced publications offer an opportunity for experimentation. There are few copyright issues, the texts generally exist in electronic form, there are few illustrations, the material is timely, the distribution is often quite informal, and these publications are often shared with other academic institutions. UMCP and RPI will be creating local files of full text of technical reports generated from work done on their respective campus. Documents in the files will be tied to the respective library catalogs. Users will identify documents of interest through the catalog and move electronically to the document file. Documents will be transmitted over the Internet between UMCP and RPI and downloaded locally for printing. It is anticipated that a relatively small number of technical reports online (no more than 200 total, 100 at each institution) will be needed to demonstrate concept feasibility in this project.