I assume Dan is talking about the ultrafiche LAC.  We have that here at
Pepperdine.  Last year we bought the tape with the catalog records from
OCLC and added them to our Voyage OPAC.  We have seen some increase in use
- previously only a few dedicated faculty were using the ultrafiche.
Formerly we had Minolta readers and just purchased a special high power
lense to magnify the fiche to a readable size.  This summer we switched to
Canon Microfilm scanners; again an additional lens and some "fooling
around" will produce a readable image in most cases.  As with all set the
quality of the microfilming varies greatly.

Elizabeth Parang
Coordinator of Periodicals
Pepperdine University Libraries
Malibu, CA 90263
310-506-4046
elizabeth.parang@pepperdine.edu

-----Original Message-----
Date: Tue, 18 Sep 2001 14:30:10 -0600
From: Dan Lester <dan@riverofdata.com>
Subject: Re: Microbook Library of American Civilization (3 messages)

The LAC materials were published in the sixties by a unit (subsidiary,
spinoof, or whatever) of Encyclopedia Britannica.  It cost vast
amounts of money at the time, but was somewhat useful to the many
colleges that were booming with baby boomers and needed to expand
collections.

The 300x microform was never very satisfactory.  The readers were even
less satisfactory. Most of us are familiar with the problems of moving
normal microfiche around and trying to get a page centered on the
screen to be read.  With the much greater reduction in size of the
image, that problem became very serious.  There aren't very many
working readers left in the world, I'm sure.  There was never a reader
printer, so that reduced further the popularity of the collection with
both librarians and students.  Finally, the problem of cataloging the
whole collection was daunting, and many libraries never cataloged the
contents of the collection.

The above is from my memory, further clouded by antibiotics as I sit
at home on sick leave.  Corrections are welcomed from others who
remember the purchase of the collections in their libraries.

dan

--
Dan Lester, Data Wrangler  dan@RiverOfData.com
3577 East Pecan, Boise, Idaho  83716-7115 USA
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