A methodology for taking account of user tasks, goals and behavior for design of computerized library catalogs

Catalogs have long been the primary device by which people gain access to the contents of libraries. For most of the twentieth century, this device has been in the form of the familiar card catalog. The advent of library automation systems in the 1960s and 1970s, originally for such housekeeping tasks as acquisition and circulation control, provided the opportunity for a new form of library catalog, which is now known generically as the Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC).