MIT to Computerize Library System

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has almost completed the installation of a library system that will enable students to locate books through public computer terminals, MIT library officials said this week.

The computer catalog system will allow users to locate books by author, book title, subject, key words and call numbers through 30 public computer terminals, said MIT Systems Librarian Amira Aaron. The on-line system should be operating by June, she said.

The MIT network may be expanded to tap into computerized catalog systems at other local universities, such as Boston University and Brandeis University, schools that Aaron said already employ the same system as the one MIT is installing. She said it would probably be several years, however, before such an arrangement could be worked out.

Planners are also looking into the possibilities of connecting the catalog to a campus-wide computer network that would allow students to call up listings without actually going to one of the libraries, where MIT will place the public terminals.

Unlike other area schools, Harvard does not have any means for students to locate books by computer terminals.

Harvard library officials said they have been working on a system similar to the one at MIT, but the earliest the network will be completed is 1989. Aaron said it took MIT slightly more than four years to complete its system, which Harvard officials said is geared toward a library collection much smaller than Harvard's.

Of the two million volumes in the MIT libraries, more than 300,000 have been recorded into the catalog system, and a thousand more are being added each week, Aaron said.

All books MIT has obtained since 1974 are accessible through the on-line system, Aaron said. It will be more than two years before the computerized system will include all materials MIT has acquired since 1964, she said.

"We're certainly not the first university to have an on-line system," said Bryan R. Moser, president of MIT's Undergraduate Council, adding that students recognize the new system as an "added resource."