Excerpt from Annual Report of the Librarian of Congress: For the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1969 When directors of the three national libraries - the Library of Congress, the National Library of Medicine, and the National Agricultural Library - agreed in June 1967 to adopt common goals in developing their automation programs, they gave formal recognition to the importance of coordinated efforts in this area. To identify problems and to recommend cooperative programs, they cre'ated a u.s. National Libraries Task Force on Automation and Other Cooperative Services. This task force has concentrated its attention on standard bibliographic codes, automated controls over serial publications, and acquisitions. Near the close of fiscal 1969 the directors of the three libraries adopted standards for a calendar date code, a character set for roman alphabets and romanized nonroman alpha bets, and a language code. Use of these codes will aid rapid transmission and use of machine-readable bibliographic data. Acquisitions policies of the three libraries are also under study to avoid unnecessary duplication, and a national pilot project to develop a union list of the currently published scientific and technical serials in the three libraries is planned. Systems studies of acquisitions have been launched that will build links between mechanized processes in searching and ordering procedures and eliminate duplication of these steps. An important step for the future Of library automation was the inauguration of the marc Distribution Service on March 27, 1969, when the first computer tapes containing LC cataloging data were mailed to subscribers. By the close of the fiscal year nearly 60 subscribers were receiving cataloging data on tape for all monographs published in the United States in English and cataloged by the Library Of Congress. The marc 11 format has been adopted by the British National Bibliography for use in the ongoing UK marc Pilot Project. Its basic structure is being considered as a national standard by the United States of America Standards Institute and has been adopted by the Committee on Scientific and Technical Information (cosati), the Federal Library Committee, the Special Libraries Association, the National Libraries Task Force on Automation and Other Cooperative Services, and the American Library Association. Through marc, libraries can exchange bibliographic information and reduce input costs. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.