Online Public Access Catalogs: Linking OPACs: Policy Issues and Considerations

Librarians had it pretty easy in the “good old days” of stand‐alone OPACs. Users would wander into to the library, sidle up to an OPAC terminal, and search for the desired item. If the user found what he or she was looking for, fine. If not, the user's search went beyond the world of new‐fangled technology and into the more comfortably traditional ILL process. Depending on the individual library, the search would continue in an automated environment (e.g., on OCLC), or perhaps even revert back to a manual process (ALA ILL forms, etc.). Either way, the user was left in the dark, as ILL was more or less a “back room” process.