Seventeen of the twenty five papers presented at this conference appear in a variety of camera-ready fonts and formats. Titles of the remaining papers are also listed and all papers are indexed in a combined subject, author, affiliation index.

The names of fifteen products reviewed at the meeting are listed, but there is no documentation about the products themselves. Cibbarelli, the chair of the program and compiler of the Proceedings also provides two of the papers which respectively deal with her own company's and users' evaluations of integrated library software available in North America. The company evaluation is of about 40 packages that are DOS microcomputer-based (out of what are said to be about 240 commercially available packages in the U.S. at the time). The user comparative evaluation is of eleven major systems including systems used extensively outside the U.S such as DYNIX, BASIS, Inmagic Plus, Innopac and VTLS.

Other papers deal with applications on specific systems such as serials automation, and linking of other databases to library catalogues. There are also presentations dealing with acquisition of systems: administrative issues, requests for proposal, contracts, and installation; and with networking of systems: Z39.50 and network architecture.

Although conferences such as this are often of more value to those attending for what is discussed away from the formal sessions rather than the documentation of those sessions, the collected papers nevertheless would be of interest to library and systems administrators responsible for system installation and maintenance. Individual papers on specific systems or comparisons will from time to time provide useful detail when extracted form information retrieval systems.

Last updated 14 March 1995