Dartmouth College: The BRS Link
| Published date | 01 January 1983 |
| Date | 01 January 1983 |
| Pages | 55-58 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb047481 |
| Author | Emily Fayen |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
Dartmouth College:
The BRS Link
EMILY FAYEN
Do you remember when you were a student and
you needed five books on some topic for a term pa-
per before tomorrow? After five years of planning
and three years of development, the Dartmouth
College Library is now making this problem a thing of
the past. In fact, at Dartmouth the computer will al-
most write the paper for you, but that's another
story.
What's happened to bring this all about? Since
1979,
Dartmouth College and Bibliographic Retrieval
Services (BRS) of Latham, New York, have been
working together to develop an online catalog for the
Dartmouth College Libraries. In April, 1983, the on-
line catalog was first made widely available to stu-
dents,
faculty, and other library users. But, as the
book says, "It's different at Dartmouth."
What's different about Dartmouth's online cata-
log? First of all the catalog was designed and devel-
oped with its
users
in mind. This results from the fact
that although library staff has had a large hand in its
development, the concept of the online catalog was
never intended to be primarily a support for library
processing. It was developed first and foremost as a
reference aid for patrons.
The second difference is that the online catalog
was created with the same database design and search
software that had been developed for large scale on-
line information
retrieval
applications,
not for library
processing applications. As a result, the Dartmouth
online catalog has the full-text retrieval and full
Boolean operator features not usually found in sys-
tems intended for libraries.
A third distinction is that the online catalog was
designed to be used directly by students, faculty, and
other library patrons. Therefore, the method of using
the system had to be simple enough so that non-
tutored patrons could use it for themselves. Further-
more, it had to be simple enough so that they could
teach themselves how it worked.
Dartmouth
Parameters
The Library was established soon after the college
was founded. It now has a collection of more than
1.5 million books, 95,000 maps, and 800,000 micro-
form materials as well as an extensive collection of
manuscripts, audio-visual materials, and other special
items such as Daniel Webster's silk socks. The collec-
tion has doubled in size every 40 years since the
Library's beginning, and every 20 years since the start
of this century. Dartmouth joined the Association of
Research Libraries in 1969. Ten years later it joined
the Research Libraries Group.
Bibliographic Retrieval Services (BRS) is a well-
known bibliographic utility providing online search
services to over 50 databases in a wide range of sub-
ject areas. They also provide Private Data File ser-
vices and other information products tailored to meet
the needs of their users. Until recently, BRS had pro-
vided all its services employing large IBM mainframe
computer equipment. However, for some time a need
was seen for corporations, libraries, and other in-
stitutions to have online access to local information
using computers that might be installed and operated
within their own institutions.
BRS thus set out to develop a new product. They
Fayen is Director of Library Automation at
Dartmouth College Library where she has worked
with both the OCLC and the RLIN Systems.
Photos by Nancy Wasserman, Hanover, NH.
SUMMER 1983 55
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