New technology and exchange formats

The last 15 years have seen a tremendous growth in the exchange of bibliographic records between organizations which has been assisted by advances in information technology. The library community has developed UNIMARC and the abstracting and indexing community are using the UNISIST Reference Manual to facilitate the transfer of bibliographic data between databases. Unesco is establishing a Common Communication Format in an attempt to bridge the gap between the library and A & I communities. However, different practices in record creation between organizations providing records mean that records from different sources cannot always be merged com fortably into one database even if they have been converted into the same exchange format.
One way of achieving the necessary compatibility between records from different sources is by editing the records as they are received. This can be time-consuming and can make the use of records from outside sources uneconomic. New technology, in the form of intelligent terminals, can make this more of a practical proposition. Records can be obtained on-line from external databases and can then be changed either by the intervention of the operator or by programs in the terminal which can make changes to the data or tags of particular fields before adding the records to the file. Very little research has been done on the economics of using intelligent terminals to edit records but this kind of operation is likely to increase in the future as more bibliographic systems using intelligent terminals are developed.