The British National Bibliographic Service provided by the British Library is designed to support book selection and acquisition, information retrieval, cataloguing and other technical processes in libraries Throughout the four decades of its development, new production technologies have done much to determine the elements of the service, which currently include printed and microfiche bibliographies, and online and magnetic tape based machine- readable services This article reviews, from a technical perspective, the evolution of the service, and surveys the present environment in which it supports the library functions that it is intended to serve.
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