HOLLIS Officially Opens at Widener

Even as the University celebrated the official opening of its new on-line computer catalog, the director of the Harvard University Library said yesterday more technological innovations must be made to keep the library up to date.

Pforzheimer University Professor Sidney Verba '53, who oversees Harvard's 11-million volume system, said that the new Harvard OnLine Library Information System (HOLLIS) is but the first step in what will be a major technological overhaul of the library system. He added, however, that future innovations are still a long way off.

To bring about such long-term changes, Verba said Harvard must take a more activist approach to updating its extensive library system, a network that currently includes 98 separate libraries and is the world's largest private collection.

The University's library system is thought to be one of the nation's most conservative, concerned more with maintaining the size of its holdings than with experimenting with new technology, Verba said.

Harvard took more than eight years to develop the HOLLIS system, while schoolssuch as Stanford University have been on-line foras long as five years.

But, although Verba acknowledged that theUniversity took a long time to develop HOLLIS, hesaid the new computer system will be the lynchpinin his plans to make new and more sophisticatedtechnology available to Harvard's thousands oflibrary-goers.

"HOLLIS is going to serve as the gateway toother places where the new electronic materialswill be stored," Verba said. "More and more atHarvard we will be finding things are published inelectronic forms--and HOLLIS will be the way todeal with the explosion."

In the long-term, Verba said he hopes to makeHOLLIS a computer system which users can tap intoto read the contents of the latest scholarlyjournals or to make extensive bibliographies.

The need for this new technology, Verba said,is prompted by a twosided explosion inelectronics: "First, you have an explosion in thenumber of people who own the kind of machine thatcan access this kind of electronic stuff, and thenyou have lots of people publishing in some newelectronic form of another."

The first step in Harvard's long-range planningwill be a study, funded by an outside grant, toinvestigate what the latest and most usefullibrary technologies are.

"We're not going to get the state of the arttechnology that's being designed in Kendall Squareright now," said Verba, who has headed the Harvardlibraries for the past four years. "That we won'tget for the next 10 or so years."

"All this talk about the electronic library ofthe future--that's a long way off," Verba said