Networking and issues of retroconversion

Retrospective catalogue conversion is an issue which is measurable, finite and capable of resolution, if only the funds were available to libraries. A great deal of information already exists on the scale of the problem; for example, using the European Commission’s LIB-2 Study for the United Kingdom’, it is possible to calculate that perhaps thirty million items remain to be converted in British universities alone. In a European context it can be seen even more narrowly as a problem of larger and older libraries. The historic richness of their collections, built up over many centuries and from many countries, has created in such libraries a dense tapestry recording the continuum of recorded knowledge. In some cases this has led to a tension between the retroconversion of the material which library users want and the recording of the national patrimony. Put crudely, there is a tendency amongst national libraries to see retroconversion in terms of the cultural patrimony of the nation. Against this, large research and university libraries are more often concerned with the local universe of knowledge contained in their collections. This debate also opens up issues of whether we should even be attempting to convert all of our catalogue records to machine-readable form. If we
do, the task will cost enormous sums and will take many years to complete.