Card-image public access catalogues (CIPACs): an international survey

This paper surveys card-image public access catalogues (CIPACs) – online library catalogues based on databases of digitized catalogue cards and more or less sophisticated mechanisms for browsing or searching. Solutions of this kind have been implemented by a number of libraries in various countries since the mid-1990s, mainly as inexpensive alternatives to a full retrospective conversion of their old catalogues. The article presents a web-page dedicated to CIPACs, identifies and describes four main categories of interface software for such catalogues, and provides a comparative overview of fifty CIPACs in eleven countries, looking at aspects such as geographical distribution, growth and size, software, number of catalogues, processing and index creation, navigation, image formats, and other features.