Use of an ICT 1907 computer in Southampton university library report No. 3

The first and second Reports on the automated circulation system at Southampton were primarily drafted as internal memoranda, and their wider dissemination in PROGRAM, Nos. 1 and 3, was not originally planned. However, Report No. 2 is dated 9th September, 1966, a month before any part of the system came into operation, and although there are brief references in PROGRAM 4 and 6, no further report in this series has been published. An account of the first months of work has been published in “Libraries and Machines Today”, edited by C.D. Batty (Scunthorpe, North Midland Branch of the Library Association, 1967). B.A.J. McDowell, the University Data Processing Officer, prepared a full description of the system, but only in a limited edition. A revised edition is in preparation and will be available for sale. This report therefore deals with the operation of the system up to the satisfactory establishment of automatic recording (referred to in Report No. 2 as Stage II). Stage I, manual recording with machine updating of the files, was introduced as planned in October 1966. Various difficulties were encountered during the first term, but after Christmas these were largely overcome and by the end of the academic year issues exceeded 80,000, Much of our success must be attributed to the work of the Counter Supervisor at that time, Miss M.I. Cooper, who devoted many hours to checking errors and devising improvements.