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What has technical services to do with collection development for children's collections—or any other kind of collections for that matter? Isn't technical services what happens after selection decisions and other collection development plans are complete? Don't the technical services staff simply execute the decisions? These questions are familiar to any technical services librarian who ventures across the invisible line into the world of material selection and collection development, and onto the toes of subject specialists, bibliographers, reference or children's specialists, who inhabit that world. They rule their domain with clearly defined credentials supporting their hegemony, largely ignoring the mundane concerns of their technical services colleagues.

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 traditional methods of library book lending and membership control are discussed, and the advantages of bar code based automated systems are suggested. The experiences of seven major Singapore libraries in implementing such systems are compared, with special reference to the use of ‘specific’, ‘significant’ or ‘smart’ bar codes, comparisons of purchased versus locally printed labels and homebrew versus turnkey systems, and a look at the problems of retrospective conversion.