Building a Nationwide Bibliographic Database

The creation of a nationwide bibliographic database (NBD) has been the shared responsibility of the national libraries, the major bibliographic utilities, and individual libraries. Libraries have contributed their local cataloging records to the national hosts, the bibliographic utilities, which in turn, made these records widely available. The emergence of local shared automated library systems has introduced a new set of stakeholders into this environment. Their participation in bibliographic networking will result in a decentralized nationwide bibliographic database stored in multiple locations.