Merging catalog entries from various countries into an online union catalog

Introduction This paper will examine the possibility of constructing an online international union catalog from machine readable entries originating in different countries. Benefits of such a union catalog would be extensive, since it would greatly increase availability of library resources internationally and reduce rates of rise of processing costs in participating libraries. The discussion of catalog entries will be limited to descriptive cataloging and will include only title and author elements, only catalog entries originating in different language regions, and only catalog entries in machine readable form.