Libraries' costly converter

Fifty million library catalogue records must be converted into a computer-readable format at a cost of up to Pounds 100 million, according to a study out next week.

The report says the records need to be brought into line with those already in a machine-readable format, enabling researchers to search for them on the Internet. It says that a national strategy should be developed by the Library and Information Commission.

The two-part study was led by Philip Bryant of Bath University and funded by the funding councils' Joint Information Systems Committee and the British Library Research and Innovation Centre.

More than 220 university and higher education libraries responded to the study's request for information on the status of their catalogues. Some 28 million catalogue records, representing six million individual titles, await conversion. Four million of the records are for titles found in special collections, mainly in the humanities and social sciences.

Nine million records - five million individual titles - require conversion in the 112 public libraries that responded to the study. The study estimates that in the public library sector 12 million records wil need to be converted.