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SLS has been involved in the development of the SR/Z39.50 protocol via the UK Pre‐Implementors‘ Group. It is one of the first UK companies to offer a Z39.50 client. This article concentrates on the impact of users’ needs on the design of the client. There is also a short section on SLS' Z39.50 server, which was launched in January 1995; a local database server will be made available in Summer 1995, which will allow LIBERTAS customers to open up access to their own bibliographic records via Z39.50/SR.

The purpose of this article is to present an overview of the history and development of transaction log analysis (TLA) in library and information science research. Organizing a literature review of the first twenty‐five years of TLA poses some challenges and requires some decisions. The primary organizing principle could be a strict chronology of the published research, the research questions addressed, the automated information retrieval (IR) systems that generated the data, the results gained, or even the researchers themselves. The group of active transaction log analyzers remains fairly small in number, and researchers who use transaction logs tend to use this method more than once, so tracing the development and refinement of individuals' uses of the methodology could provide insight into the progress of the method as a whole. For example, if we examine how researchers like W. David Penniman, John Tolle, Christine Borgman, Ray Larson, and Micheline Hancock‐Beaulieu have modified their own understandings and applications of the method over time, we may get an accurate sense of the development of all applications.

Introduction Since the earliest transaction monitoring studies, researchers have encountered the boundaries that define transaction log analysis as a methodology for studying the use of online information retrieval systems. Because, among other reasons, transaction log databases contain relatively few fields and lack sufficient retrieval tools, students of transaction log data have begun to ask as many questions about what transaction logs cannot reveal as they have asked about what transaction logs can reveal. Researchers have conducted transaction monitoring studies to understand the objective phenomena embodied in this statement: “Library patrons enter searches into online information retrieval systems.” Transaction log data effectively describe what searches patrons enter and when they enter them, but they don't reflect, except through inference, who enters the searches, why they enter them, and how satisfied they are with their results.

A project was devised to develop a number of user interfaces to an experimental online public access catalogue which could then be evaluated in a series of user tests. BRS/Search commercial software, mounted on a large 16‐bit microcomputer, was used to create the interfaces; this saved time and effort in producing the software. The database was small, consisting of only a few thousand records obtained from the education section of a real library catalogue. Particular attention was paid to the average person's understanding of Boolean logic and terms when searching an online catalogue. It is hoped to investigate the design and format of browse screens in online catalogues. The software and hardware used in this project are described at some length. The problems and advantages of using commercial software for this research are discussed.

Computers have been used at Brunel University Library for acquisitions and circulation since the early 1970s. Over the years there has been a move away from locally written systems running at the university's computer centre to stand‐alone turnkey systems in the library. This has involved the transfer of the ALS card‐based system to BLCMP's CIRCO system. The implementation of BLCMP's Integrated Library System (BLS) is also described with special reference to the replacement of a card catalogue by an Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC) developed from the short title file of an early circulation system.

From Boolean operators to virtual reality…..

It has become of increasing importance to the UK library community to estimate the proportion of library acquisitions in the United Kingdom for which a UK MARC record is available at the time of cataloguing. This proportion is called the hit rate. The libraries have for the purpose of the study been divided into two sectors, academic libraries and public libraries. This paper uses a beta‐binomial model to enable us to attribute standard errors to each of our overall hit rate estimates and to investigate the difference between the hit rates of the two populations. The model also provides an estimate of the individual hit rate for any given library. Such estimates are useful for identifying libraries which are not typical of the library population from which they are drawn. The model is applied to data obtained from the Centre of Catalogue Research.

This paper presents an evaluation of three Web based prototypes for bibliographic displays developed as part of an ongoing research project at the Faculty of Information Studies of the University of Toronto. The development of these prototypes builds upon results obtained in earlier phases of the project that addressed issues of both the content and form of bibliographic displays in Public Access Catalogues (Chan 1995; Luk 1996). Anticipation of continued growth in the number of catalogues available through the World Wide Web, combined with evidence (Cherry and Cox 1996) that existing Web based displays have not shown improvement over their text‐based counterparts, motivated the development of these prototypes for use on the Web. The findings from a focus group evaluation of the three prototypes are also reported, and suggestions made for future research.

The 19th edition of the Dewey Decimal Classification was published in 1979 and will be the last edition to appear under the editorship of Benjamin A. Custer, the editor since the 16th edition, published in 1958. There is thus a suitable opportunity to review the evolution of the Classification over the past thirty years, and to indicate the likely developments in the 20th edition and beyond. This paper is not a literature review although reference will be made to pertinent contributions in the literature. There is a substantial body of literature on the Dewey Decimal Classification and the most recent portion is covered in two bibliographies.

Online Public Access Catalogues (OPACs) in an increasing number of libraries are now available using the Joint Academic Network (JANET). Until the present time, this access has been obstructed for the casual user by the lengthy JANET addressing codes and varying log‐on procedures required by each library system.