Twenty-Five Years of Bibliographic Control Research at the University of Bradford

This article describes cooperation between Bradford University Library and the Department of Computing that has resulted in nine research projects over a twenty-five year period on various aspects of bibliographic control. It recounts the origins of the Universal Standard Bibliographic Code (USBC) and its development for the identification of both books and non-book material. It then describes various aspects of the projects including simulating the merging necessary to set up a national database, the cleaning of a database, its use in inter-library lending, and its application together with expert systems for the quality control of databases. The final project is BOPAC that has used modern technology to create faster and better access to a number of li-brary catalogues worldwide and has demonstrated that authority control in its present form is not effective.