The recent posting on MELVYL was accurate in part -- but hid some of the
potentially useful possibilities involved in MELVYL access. MY understanding
of MELVYL is as follows: It is 1) a "union catalog" of holdings of (all?) the
UCal and CalState system libraries (main, med school, law school, subject-
specialized, etc) plus holdings of State of CA library, Stanford, USC, LAMNH,
the Getty, etc. it is _ALSO_ a "campus-wide information system" that provides
access to databases, etc -- but only to "local, approved"(with passwords) users
from the relevant institutions. The OPAC functions (online public access
catalog) functions are accessible to anyone who can use the Internet. You
can "gateway" via a system such as CARL (Telnet pac.carl.org) or directly
(melvyl.ucop.edu [I think]). This kind of "mixed" access -- distributed
access to databases -- will become more common in the future. CARL already
makes access to some bibliographic databases possible for users with their
own individually acquired passwords or (in some cases) free.
Kate McCain "Die Gedankenexperimente sind Frei!!"
College of Information Studies
Drexel University
BITNET MCCAINKW at DUVM
INTERNET mccainkw at duvm.ocs.drexel.edu
