Cost Savings and Service Strategies in the British National Bibliographic Service

Abstract

The British Library launched in 1986 a Catalogue Action Plan to deal with the long-term prospect of declining financial and manpower resources, the absence of growth in the market for its services, an unacceptably large backlog of uncatalogued materials, and a steadily increasing annual output of British publications to be catalogued. The initial phase of the Plan was designed to contain staff costs by reduction and simplification in data content in BNBMARC and other British Library records, predicating their future use primarily in an online (OPAC) environment. It has had significant success for the British Library's aims in the first full year of implementation, but it has raised questions of the cost-benefit in centralized cataloguing services for the library community, in respect both of the costs and sizing of OPAC systems in local libraries and of the necessity of sustaining indefinitely the high cost of adherence to international standards established before OPACs, the CD-ROMs and OSI had changed the technology.