On‐line opportunity: a comparison of activities in America and the United Kingdom

In the United States the chances of visiting a large industrial or federal library which does not make use of computer terminal capabilities grow increasingly slight. On talking to American librarians it is clear that on‐line computing facilities are regarded, not with feelings of dubiety but as accepted working tools. Their applications include housekeeping activities such as the monitoring of journal acquisition, accession and checking procedures, and the transfer of bibliographic records, in addition to user profile development for current awareness and retrospective searching.