MONO91 Indexes Compiled by Machine chapter Mary Elizabeth Stevens National Bureau of Standards "Two important advantages of the punched-card method were foreseen when the publication began. First, it would be possible to print lists from the cards at will, without any further editing or proofreading, once the information was in punched-card form. Second, there was the possibility of mechanically preparing special lists of titles, selected on the basis of subject, country, or language 1/ Thus, by 1953, "a number of instances of printed indexes prepared by machine" could be claimed. 2/ The use of punched cards to sort, to prepare tabular listings for various drafts and revisions, and to interfile corrected or revised entries greatly facilitated the preparation at Battelle Memorial Institute of the subject index to the Proceedings of the International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, 1955 (Lipetz, 1960 [367]). Developments in the use of punched card machine techniques in bibliographic opera- tions of these types, beginning in the 1950's, have by no means been limited to the United States. For example, Remington Rand punched cards have been used in the preparation of a national union catalog of Italian libraries 3/ and Mikhailov reports for the All-Union Institute of Scientific and Technical Information (VINITI) as follows: "The development program for machine production of indexes has been underway at the Institute for a number of years. . In fact, operational use of Soviet-made punch-card machines to compile the author indexes for some of the series of our Abstract Journal has been practiced at the Inst[OCRerr]tute since 1957 " 4/ In France, at the Centre d'Etudes Nucleaires, Saclay, a program has been developed for mechanization of the production of biweekly and cumulative indexes and for demand searches (Chonez, 1960 [116, 117, 118]). With the advent of automatic data processing systems, the speed, the flexibility and the capability for multiple-purpose processing buttress the claim that the card catalog can be "replaced or supplemented by book catalogs made with the aid of mechanized equip- ment". [OCRerr]5/ It is further claimed that "The printed catalog produced by means of automatic equipment combines the best features of the conventional card catalog and the traditional printed catalog, and adds to both new dimensions that would have been unbelievable a generation ago." 6/ A joint project is under way by the Medical Libraries of Columbia, 1/ 2/ 3/ 4/ 5/ 6/ U.S. Congress Senate Committee on Government Operations, 1960 [619], p.85. Larkey, 1953, [351], p. 38. Berry, 1958 [58], p. 287. Mikhailov, 1962 [410], p. 50. McCormick, 1963 [408], p. 195. Vertanes, 1961 [625], p.242. This is with reference to the LILCO Library Printed Catalog, which is prepared by sorting and processing information on titles, authors and titles-by-subject-groupings serving as indexes to the holdings at the Long Island Lighting Company. 22