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The Singapore Integrated Library Automation Service (SILAS) has rapidly established itself in the 30 months since its selection of the WLN Bibliographic Subsystem. This paper discusses why that package was chosen, and the adjustments and enhancements that were necessary to make it the hub of a national bibliographic network in South East Asia in the late 1980s. The staffing and governance needs of such a network are also outlined. The paper concludes with a report on the position of the network at the end of 1987.

The Singapore Integrated Library Automation Service provides a national bibliographic source, a shared library network, a cooperative online shared cataloguing facility and a national union catalogue for the libraries of Singapore. This paper traces the history of Silas with special emphasis on the building of the database by merging together bought‐in files with the machine‐readable cataloguing of the National Library and other major Singapore libraries. The setting up of a data communications network based on communicating personal computers is also discussed.

Dear Sir, The article by John Ross and Bruce Royan on MERLIN in the July issue of Program (Vol. 10. No. 3, 1976) was an excellent explanation of the new system to be introduced by the British Library. I am concerned, however, with the implications contained in two statements relating to the MERLIN format.

The SCRAN multimedia resource base has been built with capital funding from the National Lottery, but its future relies on securing a revenue stream to support its services. This article describes how SCRAN has gone about building an e‐commerce service.

Increasingly, librarians are being offered the same information from a range of different sources and through a variety of different delivery channels. Many Journal titles, for example, are now available as print subscriptions, on CD‐ROM, via online hosts and from on demand document delivery services. As part of the UK Electronic Libraries programme, the authors have developed a simple decision support tool which allows a Library Manager to compare the total cost of acquiring a given item of information from each of a number of different sources. The costing approach employed was developed by the Task Force on MA/HEM — Methodology for Access/Holdings Economic Modelling — and the system was implemented using Microsoft Excel.

The product of the Scholar's Workstation Project is a single Web site that provides, through a consistent interface, a complete operating environment for the common tasks (information retrieval, communication and personal productivity) of the academic researcher. As well as providing links to a large number of local, national and international information sources (library OPACs, Internet search tools, gateway services, directories, software archives, etc), the site may be configured so that users may launch their own personal desktop applications (word processing, email, etc) or even access local CD‐ROM networks.

Perhaps the single greatest obstacle to the creation and use of digital content, is uncertainty over copyright issues, and in particular a fear that the new technologies may facilitate intellectual property theft. This paper draws on the experience of the Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network (SCRAN) to review some of the issues that should be addressed in this area.

The difficulties of retrospective library catalogue conversion are described. Computer Input Microfilm (CIM) is compared with more conventional Optical Character Recognition (OCR) techniques. After giving examples of known uses of the technique, and listing studies of it in a library context, the paper outlines the scope for such a system within a very large library such as the British Library.

The British Library is developing a new computer system to cope with all the current and future cataloguing and bibliographic requirements of the Library and its users. The system is called MERLIN (MachinE Readable Library INformation) and its facilities are outlined in this paper. The nub of MERLIN is a central database and some of its basic design is described briefly. The types of input to the system and the range of possible output are also covered, as are the expanded character sets which MERLIN will be able to provide. There is an indication of how MERLIN will be able to satisfy a wide range of users without requiring repetitive complex input specifications, by utilising User Profiles, tailored to each particular user. Finally there is an explanation of how MERLIN will be introduced in various phases.

The October 1990 issue of Vine contained articles on the development of the UNIX operating system and the marketplace for integrated library systems capable of running under UNIX. This paper describes one user's experience of migrating its library management system to a UNIX platform, and integrating it into a campus‐wide network.