Experience with LPIS 5

VISK 5 in the Year 2000: Brief Description of Experience with the Subprogramme

For many Czech libraries, the VISK 5 subprogramme offers the possibility of continuing projects already under way, and, at the same time, gives them hope of successfully completing them. For other libraries, it may be a chance of launching a programme of retrospective conversion. VISK 5 also opens catalogues and holdings of Czech libraries and, thanks to the use of the Internet, puts on-site and off-site clients, clients in big cities with big libraries and clients in small villages on an equal footing.

Clearly and unambiguously stated conditions for obtaining subsidies enhance coordination of activities with the aim of limiting the number of conversions of the same records and adhering to standards, which is a prerequisite for a repeated use of records generated. The high utilization rate of Czech National Bibliography records, the retrospective of which covers the entire 20th century, is a very positive feature. By 2003, the coverage of Czech books published in the 20th century will significantly improve when records from catalogues of the NL, Moravian Library, the State Research Library in Olomouc and other state research libraries, and in the Library of Parliament (but missing from the Czech National Bibliography) have been added. The holdings of the Library of the National Museum ("LNM") are not included in the list because the LNM must first automate its library processes, which are closely related to the process of retrospective conversion of catalogues.

Practical experience of Czech libraries (supported by experience in other countries) shows that the process of retrospective conversion is ineffective if more than two or three sources are to be searched for data. And because the library's own catalogue is one, there are only one or two other possibile. For that reason it is very important that possibilities for the use of the CASLIN Union Catalogue for retrospective conversion purposes be enhanced by extending "technological" possibilities for receiving records, as well as by importing the maximum number of available records to the union catalogue.