ABSTRACT
The automation of the card catalog and major internal library processes was the paradigm of research libraries’ planning and vision for the period 1970–1990. This vision, of the “automated” library, in which redundant and detailed paper-based processes were converted to electronic form, was the culmination of a set of achievements, the object of which was to make universal bibliographic access a reality. It was an initiative as vast, and as visionary, as the Public Library Movement of the early Twentieth Century, or the great union catalog and interlibrary loan efforts which helped to shape the directions of librarianship in the years before and after the Second World War. Equally important has been the development of the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules which set standards for card catalog production that enabled the union catalog and interlibrary loan initiatives.
