Wisconsin: Events signal promising future

One word characterizes the implementation of information technologies and advanced telecommunications in Wisconsin over the past decade: “uneven.” Wisconsin was a leader in the development of its statewide union catalog, known as WISCAT (Wisconsin catalog). From its humble beginnings in the early 1980s, WISCAT has grown into a CD‐ROM‐based catalog that contains 4.97 million titles and 24 million holdings from 1,084 contributing libraries in the state. Wisconsin's state library agency, the Division for Libraries and Community Learning, had an early Internet gopher and was among the first states to have a World Wide Web home page. On the other hand, the development of Internet access in libraries throughout the state has been slow. Great strides and technological innovation are much in evidence in some localities and regions, but other areas lag far behind. Measured by the comparative percentages of school and public libraries with Internet access, Wisconsin has been lax. Several events in the last two years hold promise for correcting this situation and for moving Wisconsin into the passing lane on the information superhighway.