Planning for automation: catalogue use survey at Humberside College of Higher Education Available to Purchase

Humberside College of Higher Education is comparable to a polytechnic in its size and range of courses, and is the largest of the six major higher education colleges in England and Wales; the college also has the largest Library/Learning Resources operation. It has four main sites, three in Hull and one across the Humber at Grimsby. There are, at present, seven libraries and a central Bibliographical Services Unit. The library has a union COM catalogue produced monthly via the BLAISE/LOCAS system, which has been received since October 1981. Retrospective cataloguing is still underway to convert each site's card catalogue into machine‐readable format. Currently there are 60,000 monograph titles (representing 150,000 copies) covered by the union COM catalogue. Since 1981 in‐house computing facilities have been used to produce a subject index, and for the periodical control system. The latest aspect of the library service to undergo automation has been the book order system, in April 1985.