MOORPARK : College Automates Its Library Catalog

History professor Daniel Patrick Brown hopes Moorpark College library’s new, state-of-the-art, automated catalogue system will encourage students to work a little harder.

For many college students, if researching a paper “is too much of a hassle, they will either procrastinate or not do it all,” Brown said.

But the $54,000 computerized catalogue that began operating this summer is designed to lessen the hassle, library Director Edward Tennen said.

“The system’s uniqueness is its ability to guide the user through the search” of the library’s 62,000 volumes, he said.

With the old catalogue, students had to manually search through stacks of long, wooden drawers for cards on each book they hoped to find, then rifle through the alphabetized listings and write down each catalogue number before they searched the shelves.

Now students just step up to one of the six new computer terminals near the library’s entrance and punch a few keys to indicate what subject, title or author they want.

The system will tell students whether a particular book is already checked out, preventing fruitless searches of the shelves. It also allows them to pull up listings of two related topics at one time.

And it saves students the trouble of having to write down the name, author and publisher of every book they plan to use in a research paper because they can print bibliographies at one of the computer printers attached to each terminal.

Student Mechelle Dondo, 23, who was in the library last week researching an English paper, agreed that the new system is “much better than the card catalogue. It’s like you’re in a real library.”

Dondo added, “You dread coming to the library a little bit less” when there is no prospect of a struggle with the old, manual catalogue.

“But,” she said, “I still procrastinate as much as I would normally.”