In the United States and Canada, several regional organizations grew out of these efforts, including the Ohio College Library Center, a computer network for Ohio's college and university libraries; the Research Library Information Network of the Research Libraries Group, a consortium of libraries founded by Columbia, Harvard, and Yale universities and the New York Public Library; and the University of Toronto Library Automation System. In addition to the initial goal of providing shared cataloging, regional organizations offer an array of services to libraries, including online acquisitions services and interlibrary loan systems. Many of these regional organizations evolved to become national and international networks. Large organizations that share catalogs with one another are known as bibliographic utilities. Their massive catalogs compile materials from many member libraries, creating a vast resource for catalogers and researchers alike. For example, OCLC eventually grew to become the Online Computer Library Center, which serves as an international library computer service, bibliographic utility, and research center that by the 1990s contained more than 41 million records in its union catalog, known as WorldCat. Similarly, the UTLAS consortium of Canadian libraries was purchased by the U.S. firm Auto-Graphics, which set up a subsidiary in Canada to run this shared catalog of Canadian library databases. The new name of this service is AG Canada. In the early 1980s some libraries began to feature online public access catalogs , which allow users to access the libraries' catalogs via computer. Previously, the high cost of acquiring the new computer technology and the difficulty in using the first software programs meant that libraries had to restrict use of online catalogs to a few specially trained librarians. By the 1980s, however, advances in technology and reductions in cost allowed libraries to begin offering public access to online catalogs. For example, the University of California system introduced its massive online public access catalog, MELVYL, in 1981. Today, online public access catalogs are a common feature of all types of libraries. They have replaced and integrated four separate card catalogs: one each for author, title, and subject, as well as a card for the call-number shelf list. Online catalogs allow for rapid searching in each of these designated fields, as well as in some fields-such as the type of publication or the language in which a work was written-that were not searchable in the past. Since they were first introduced, online catalogs have been enhanced by the addition of keyword searching, which allows a user to search for works using any word in a given field. Online catalogs also typically allow users to determine whether a given item has been checked out by another user, and if so, when the item is due back in the library. A2Automated Research As early as the 1960s some researchers gained improved access to information with the introduction of electronic databases that contain abstracts and indexes of library holdings. These databases-known as abstracting and indexing databases-contain publishing data for articles and books as well as abstracts that summarize each work's content. By the early 1970s, commercial online services provided researchers with ways to remotely search through large databases, such as the Dialog Information Retrieval Service , the National Library of Medicine's Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System , and the Educational Resources Information Center database published by the U.S. Department of Education. Several other commercial databases now provide researchers with access to an enormous amount of information. For example, the DIALOG Corp., Dow Jones Interactive, and Lexis-Nexis all enable researchers to search for a single word or phrase in the full text of millions of articles published over many years. The first abstracting and indexing databases-like the first online library catalogs-were very expensive and difficult to use. They generally required a trained researcher who worked as an intermediary for library patrons searching for information. Beginning in the mid-1980s, however, commercial vendors began publishing databases on CD-ROM. These databases were less expensive to produce and easier to use. The new format allowed users to quickly search databases with relatively little assistance from trained professionals. The Internet, a computer-based worldwide information network, has had an enormous impact on libraries. Librarians use the Internet and its multimedia component, the World Wide Web, to answer reference questions and to provide access to materials not previously available to their patrons. When the Internet was first introduced in the 1960s, access to computer networks was limited almost exclusively to government and scientific communities. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, the speed and availability of computer networks and data communications lines increased tremendously, and greater numbers of people gained access to the Internet.
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