Next Generation Library Systems

摘要

The development of library management systems is amazing. In the eighties, libraries in Europe started to implement hardware and software systems to optimize their processes and working procedures. After a period of several hundred years the librarians' work turned from the manual operation of acquisition, cataloguing and circulation to automatized workflows. In this period of the development the libraries used their systems just for themselves and haven't been connected for any cooperation. Due to the pretty fast establishment of reasonable connectivity the capabilities for working with common databases have been tackled very soon. It was the beginning of the rather quick development of library networks. The cataloguing procedures for books and journals were more and more centralized in regional or national databases. Interlibrary loan switched from large card catalogues to the computerized handling of the loan requests - in other words: shared cataloguing and resource sharing. The digitization of libraries started with the introduction of library management systems. The developments were heavily appreciated by librarians and users, because the search and delivery processes of books and journals were much more comfortable than before.