I was recently reminded, yet again, of S.R. Ranganathan's Five laws of library science, in particular the one that goes "Every book its reader", when a colleague of mine (thanks Christine!) routed me a copy of the report that is the topic of this post. I think the reason Ranganathan's law seemed so apposite was its lack of plurality, which is to say the topic of this particular book is obscure enough that I might be in fact its only reader, at least in the past 30 years or so.
The report in question is entitled "Catalogue Support Systems Study: Final Report for British Columbia Library Development Commission," published in September 1975 by Infotec Systems Limited of Vancouver, BC. I recognized two of its authors right away: I took a course from one them, Peter Simmons, when I was getting my MLIS back at UBC in the mid-90s; and I recognized Bob MacDonald as an early manager of the BC Electronic Library Network (where I used to work, but he retired before my time there), and from his earlier career in library systems at UBC. Turns out I should have recognized the third author, G.R. Campbell, too given that he was one of my predecessors here at UVic ... you could say that I'm doing his job now, although the job has seen a few changes in the past 20 years or so.
So given all these connections, coupled with my general interest in the history of technology and libraries, how could I pass up a chance to see what my venerable predecessors envisioned for BC libraries back when I was in elementary school? Plus I never argue with Ranganathan - they're laws, after all ...
In a nutshell, the proposal recommends a phased approach for implementing an online provincial catalogue of all the holdings of all the libraries across BC, public, academic, government and school, primarily to facilitate cataloguing and interlibrary loan. In retrospect, I think we'd have to say this was amazingly prescient.
It wasn't implemented (at least not then, and not as described), but had it been built in the late 70s it would have leapfrogged a decade and a half of later development. And not just in library systems. You have to remember that back in 1975 it wasn't just a problem of getting computers into libraries, you had to build the networks to connect them as well. This proposal covers that aspect too, as well as the staff to manage it all. I'm fairly sure that had it been built, this would have constituted the first BC-wide computer network (via leased telephone lines, of course).
As it turned out, it would be at least another 15 years before anything like this proposal got off the ground, with the development of the BC Electronic Library Network and the OutLook, Serials and Media Union Databases (later OutLook Online) around 1990 or thereabouts. Given the involvement of Bob MacDonald in both the 1975 study and the early days of BC ELN I suspect the former had some influence on the latter. But by then the times had changed: most libraries had already chucked their card catalogues and were running their own integrated library systems, so OutLook, while useful, never quite occupied the central place a union catalogue would have 15 years previously. And in 1990 the initiative could piggyback on existing networks and infrastructure rather than construct its own; so while still forward looking wasn't quite the pioneering venture envisioned back in 1975. It's interesting (to me, anyway) to contemplate whether and how much our current technology environment would differ from what we've got now, had this early initiative gone ahead.