Libraries to Offer Computer Access

Students will be able to look up book titles this fall without leaving their rooms, University officials said yesterday.

Under a plan scheduled to be completed by September, students will be able to search for books by subject, author, title and key word from a personal computer, he said. The University has spent more than $400,000 and several years to make the catalogues accessible to students.

We would like to be ready for on-line cataloging in the fall," said Dale Flecker, who is the associate director for planning and systems for the Harvard University Library. "At this point, it looks good," he said.

University officials also will collect and sell the equipment necessary for such a connection by telephone, the administrator said. The package, which includes a modem and the software required for such a telephone link, will be available at the Office of Information and Technology (OIT) this fall.

"We want to have dial-in access for personal computers right off the bat," said Flecker.

Ronald A. Orcutt, associate director of OIT, said the project was part of a plan to make University-wide improvements available to undergraduates. "The world we have to access is personal computer-based and dominated by Macintoshes," he said. "We want to respond to that."

Access to the libraries through personal computers has been planned since 1980, Flecker said. "But it is only the first phase in a much larger project of building a central librarywide collection of information," he said.

The catalogue which Harvard students can initially look at from their rooms will be the Distributable Union Catalogue (DUC).

An official at Widner Library said that students have been frustrated in the past by the inaccessibility of libraries such as Houghton, YenChing and the Schlesinger. But University officials said after the DUC becomes on-line, Harvard will try to expand the number of card catalogues accessible by computer.

Austin S. Lin '89, a student who has used other computer cataloging systems at Harvard, said the direct room link-up is a welcome change. "It's about time that something like this was done," said the Dunster House resident. "It's really silly for people still to be flipping through millions of little cards."