Since the last issue of the newsletter, the following manuals have been made available: Searching for Bibliographic Records and Quick Reference booklet (both to be mounted on the OCLC Web in April). These supersede the Guide to Searching the Online Union Catalog, 2nd ed. and Technical Bulletin 205. Whereas the earlier guide offered information only on searching Worldcat, the new guide incorporates information on searching the Books in Print, EUR-OP, Harvard Resource File, and NetFirst databases. It also includes an eight page glossary with such current terms as "bound phrase, "EUR-OP database," "SGML," etc. The Quick Reference booklet similarly offers information on searching all five databases, and includes a great chart "Keyword Searching by Database." A new OCLC reference card has been issued, in paper and on the Web, entitled: Help Advisor : Using Electronic Help in OCLC Windows Products. This card explains "the what and how of accessing and navigating electronic help," including searching through help topics, creating and annotating bookmarks, and using context-sensitive help. In the absence of a (much needed, in my opinion), print "Passport for Windows Guide," the reference card at least gets you through the basics.

Redesign of OCLC Web: In late March, OCLC radically redesigned its Web site. A standard toolbar now offers one-click access to OCLC Home, Search, Site Map, What's New, Feedback, and Site Help pages, plus access to the major content areas (News, About OCLC, OCLC Services, Support and User Documents, Contacts and Addresses.) I think the new design is a considerable improvement, especially with the addition of the Toolbar, Site help, and Site map. The search engine has also been beefed up. You can now search by titles, text, and URLs, use Boolean operators, limit your search to a specific type of information, or browse the word list. Personally, I still find the search engine rather cumbersome and non-intuitive to use; just a bit too different from FirstSearch on the Web or WorldCat, and not as easy to use or as logical as the better Internet search engines, such as Infoseek or Excite. In most cases, I did better by relying on the site map to navigate OCLC's Web site.

New on OCLC Web: An OCLC Workstation Web Product Area was added in March. It includes information on two Pentium Dell Workstations, the M5133GS and the M5166, a high-speed fax modem, CD-ROM drive, OCLC hardware and telecommunications FAQs, and an online version of the 1996 OCLC Communications & Access Planning Guide.

Two manuals, previously available only in print editions, are now (early April 1997) available in electronic form: OCLC Selection User Guide (print version June 1996) and Authorities User Guide, 2nd ed. (print version Oct. 1996). A word to the wise: If you wish to print off a complete copy of the latter, you better have a printer with first-rate graphics capabilities, or at least keep your favorite PLI handbook at your fingertips -- my HP III laserjet printer toiled mightily for well over an hour at this Herculean task.

Cat ME Plus for Windows: OCLC is currently working on a Windows-based version of the Cataloging Microenhancer Plus, to be released during the second half of 1997. According to OCLC (News release of Feb. 26), the Windows-based version features functionality far superior to the DOS-based, including LAN compatibility, access to OCLC system news and the OCLC logon greeting, and greater interactive connectivity with OCLC Cataloging, among other virtues. It will be a 32-bit product, compatible with Windows 95 or NT, but not with Windows 3.1 or 3.11.

UNIMARC Conversion Project: UNIMARC is a bibliographic format used by many libraries in Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. As announced in OCLC's Technical Bulletin 221 (Mar. 1997), UNIMARC conversion software has just been made available, which will enable these libraries to batchload their records into WorldCat or export OCLC records to their local catalog, considerably enriching WorldCat in the process.

FirstSearch: OCLC will load a database of the seven million plus Local Data Records (LDRs) linked to about 750,000 bibliographic records in WorldCat. It will contain the WorldCat records for any serial to which an institution has attached an LDR. One record will exist for each ILDR (institution level holdings information record). New searchable fields will include: contributing library symbol or name, state, and union list of the contributing library. The Results list for the LDR database will display: serial title, format (paper, microform, electronic), contributing library symbol or name. In Phase 2 of this project, the user will be able to see the library's holdings in WorldCat; in Phase 3, this capability will be made available in any FirstSearch serials database (SUNY/OCLC Status Line Mar. 1997).

InterCat Catalog and the Internet Cataloging Project: While the OCLC-sponsored Internet Cataloging Project, begun in Oct. 1994, officially ended on June 30, 1996, OCLC is encouraging project participants and others to continue (or to start) with the identification, selection, and cataloging of Internet resources. Based on the presence of 856 fields, records created online by OCLC members will continue to be extracted from OCLC, and then loaded overnight into the InterCat Catalog, a Web-based catalog with USMARC records for more than 10,000 Internet resources. Searching the InterCat is free; additionally, one may use a variety of indexes, some of which are unavailable in WorldCat, such as bound subject phrase, electronic access (URL), and browsing by truncated OCLC number. Boolean searching is also supported. At the present time, there is no online help available, but I'd be happy to forward to any interested user the search instructions I archived from the INTERCAT listserv. The Catalog may be accessed at http://orc.rsch.oclc.org:6990, or at a newer, alternative prototype interface http://purl.org/second.

According to Erik Jul, the INTERCAT listserv moderator, the newer catalog "combines searching and browsing, and takes advantage of subject heading information in records for a hierarchical view of the database." NetScape Navigator 3.01 is the recommended browser to take advantage of this enhanced interface. Version 3.0 DEFINITELY does not work, as I found out after downloading it from our LAN! Of the 10,000 plus InterCat records, over 1,000 of them have been contributed by just one library, the Seattle Public Library. Yet by the time you receive this column (note that I don't presume to say "read"), the G.P.O. will doubtless have supplanted Seattle Public as the number one contributor of Internet records, as it has decided to catalog fully each and every one of the ever burgeoning number of titles it's now issuing electronically. Regarding legal resources in the InterCat, by my count, 11 of the 231 InterCat participants were law libraries, though, of course, the extent of activity varied considerably by institution. To get a VERY rough idea as to how many law and law-related titles were in the Catalog, I did a "Basic" search using "Law" or "legislation", and retrieved 330 items (as of Apr.11, 1997.) Hopefully, more law libraries will get involved, at least if the trends towards downsizing of cataloging departments can be reversed, or at least halted (But that's a whole 'nother topic!).

PURL Software: A PURL stands for "Persistent Uniform Resource Locator." As stated on OCLC's PURL Home Page:

Functionally, a PURL is an URL. However, instead of pointing directly to the location of an Internet resource, a PURL points to an intermediate resolution service. The PURL resolution service associates the PURL with the actual URL and returns that URL to the client.

The OCLC Office of Research began the PURL Research Project in 1995, and since January 1996, the PURL resolution service has been used as a tool for groping toward reliable, long-term access to Internet resources with minimal maintenance. A PURL is automatically assigned overnight by OCLC to every electronic link used in the InterCat Catalog. However, PURLs, once created, are not automatically written back into WorldCat. Also, OCLC is currently unable to monitor the Internet addresses represented in InterCat, and to revise all the obsolete URLs which might be associated with a particular PURL. (The PURL is never changed for the life of the resource). So, cooperative library-wide efforts are necessary to maintain the reliability of Internet addresses in InterCat. One big way to help is to sign up as a registered user of the PURL service, after which you can download the free software from the PURL Home Page. Currently, it's precompiled for SunOS, Solaris, AIX, and Linux. (Instructions and software at: http://purl.oclc.org). As a registered user, you are expected to create and maintain the accuracy of PURLs for all the Internet resources based at your institution, and (hopefully), for any you have cataloged. Creation of the PURLs is not difficult or timeconsuming, and electronic creation of PURLs at the time of cataloging shouldn't be too far in the future. Considerably more time consuming, however, is the regular monitoring, and (even worse), the updating of electronic addresses, especially for libraries cataloging Internet resources mostly external to their institutions. But help is on the way. The OCLC Office of Research is currently working on an automatic notification service which will inform PURL maintainers when any of the URLs associated with their PURLs have changed. Further along the road is automated software which will not only detect the changed URLs, but make the necessary corrections to the PURL/URL links without the need for human intervention.

The information in this section was based on OCLC documentation, and early 1997 conversations with Erik Jul. Any mistakes are, as much as I hate to admit it, my own!

OBS SIS OCLC Committe Open Discussion at AALL: Our Committee meeting will be on Monday, July 21, at 7:00-8:15 a.m. Coffee, light snacks, and exhilarating discussion (that's up to you all!) will be made available. See you there!

Correction to the March 1997 column:

Cataloging Fixed Fee Pricing: Fixed fee pricing will be based on the average cost for the previous 24 months period of historical activity (plus about 3.5 % for inflation), rather than on the last 36 months of a library's activity, as I wrote in my last column.