Online public access catalog

Although a handful of experimental systems existed as early as the 1960s, the first large-scale online catalogs were developed at Ohio State University in 1975 and the Dallas Public Library in 1978.

[2] Using a dedicated terminal or telnet client, users could search a handful of pre-coordinate indexes and browse the resulting display in much the same way they had previously navigated the card catalog.

Although the earlier character-based interfaces were replaced with ones for the Web, both the design and the underlying search technology of most systems did not advance much beyond that developed in the late 1980s.

Prior to the widespread use of the Internet, the online catalog was often the first information retrieval system library users ever encountered.

This has, in turn, led to vocal criticisms of these systems within the library community itself, and in recent years to the development of newer (often termed 'next-generation') catalogs.

These systems, known as union catalogs, are usually designed to aid the borrowing of books and other materials among the member institutions via interlibrary loan.