CAFS AS A UNIVERSITY LIBRARY CATALOGUE SEARCH FACILITY

Background; Library Glasgow University Library (GUL) has a Geac 8000 system Which includes MRMS for data entry and the online public catalogue (OPC). By the early summer of 1986, the master bibliographic file (MBIB) contained in excess of 250,000 MARC records which could be searched online at any of more than 40 public enquiry terminals by author, title, author/title, title keyword, subject or subject keyword. The system, however, remained deficient in two respects which the Library found particularly disappointing. Firstly, the keyword indexes were much less useful than they would have been had users been permitted the range of manipulation techniques associated with the standard Boolean operators. Secondly, Geac's Community Access Module permitted remote access via X‐25 to not the OPC files but to the bibliographic data associated with the Circulation system, with the results that the advantages of using full MARC records and a fairly sophisticated user‐friendly catalogue system were lost on those of our readers who preferred to utilise the campus network to check our catalogue from the comfort and conveience of their own offices. It was because the CAFS facility appeared to address both of these deficiencies that the Library expressed an interest in it, and responded positively to a suggestion that a development project on a library application should be undertaken in the University's Computing Service Department.