ABSTRACT
In his preface to The National Coordinated Cataloging Program, Warren J.Haas observed that “cataloging is what turns an accumulation of material into a library collection.” 1 Beginnings of modern cataloging practices, which, therefore, form the tap-root of advanced scholarly research, may be traced back to the advent of computer-generated data bases and MARC, an acronym for Machine Readable Cataloging, a cipher for the set of standards for identifying, storing, and communicating cataloging information. The major national computer-generated data bases are, of course, OCLC, the Online Computer Library Center, which became nationally operational in 1971, and RLIN, the Research Libraries Information Network, which followed OCLC into national use at the end of the decade. 2
