ABSTRACT
The library bibliographic networks of the 1970s were made possible by a library leadership which agreed on the application of standards and allowed decentralized market forces to define viable networking services. Because bibliographic networks succeeded, their implementation and management rapidly became the fundamental intellectual, organizational and political focus of the profession over the next decade. To appreciate fully the significance of this achievement in library networking, it is necessary to view the development of networks in their initial context. They were seen in the early 1970s, as only one, somewhat minor, element in the application of computer networking to higher education; now they are the only survivors from that ferment. Among the many papers delivered at the EDUCOM conferences of 1972–4, 1 reports by Henriette Avram on MARC at the Library of Congress (whose 80 initial subscribers had shrunk to 64) and by Frederick Kilgour on the experiments of the Ohio College Library Center (which had almost 300,000 records on file and could process 2,000 titles per day!), were indistinguishable from an array of equally premature and ambivalent ventures ranging from the Museum Computer Network, the NSF's National Science Computer Network, and networks for the delivery of instructional materials between colleges such as the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) and CONDUIT. A bibliography of the burgeoning literature of computer networking opportunities from 1970 to 1976 listed among its thousand references only four think pieces: (by Joseph Becker, Carlos Cuadra, Robert Hayes and Frederick Kilgour) indexed under library networks.2
