NBINet Center Visits Member Libraries

The NBINet joint cataloging system currently comprises 70 libraries in the Taiwan area, including the NCL and university, public and special libraries, and had over 4.15 million catalog records as of June 2002. With the exception of periodic training workshops, liaison between the various NBINet members has been largely limited to telephone, fax and e-mail correspondences. Only on rare occasions can staff of the coordinating NBINet Center visit network members to understand their operations and offer suggestions on improvement. However, with budgetary support from the Ministry of Education, the center was able to arrange visits to several of the cooperating libraries from April this year. Issues explored during the visits included data transfer scheduling problems, data conversion, cataloging procedures and linkage with NBINet, principles for arranging bibliographic material, willingness to contribute to online cooperative cataloging, use of the GUICat interface and other topics.