ABSTRACT
Cooperative approaches have already been initiated in the United Kingdom in the newspaper field with the establishment of the Newsplan program in 1982 to assist other libraries on a regional basis to coordinate their newspaper microfilming program and provide some grants for microfilming retrospective files not held in the British Library. Commercial microfilm publication projects are difficult to cover and generally have some sort of indexes. Many earlier projects produced large quantities of film but require retrospective cataloging to produce machine-readable records. Registers exist in the United States, and the British Library established such a register of microform masters in February 1986 on the broad model of the RLIN register to ensure compatibility for the exchange of records. Reciprocal arrangements for exchanging hard copy or microfiche lists of items microfilmed are relatively easy, but as the proliferate there will be many such lists to check before filming with increased costs for searching.
