N-LINE catalogues are wonderful things in principle—things of efficacy, and even, occasionally (as in the case of O.C.L.C.’s Online Union Catalog), of grandeur. As a result of the publicly financed expansion of higher education in the sixties, and the boom in academic publishing that followed it, the holdings of the typical university library have doubled over the last twenty years. Without on-line catalogues, and the circulation and acquisition modules of software with which on-line catalogues are linked, libraries would simply not have been able to process all the books and journals that were arriving on their loading docks. By the early seventies, there was an ominous arrearage of uncatalogued material waiting on herds of rolling carts near the overtaxed cataloguing departments of most large libraries. Cataloguing had reached a state of crisis similar to the one that forced the financial markets to close early during some of the high-volume weeks of 1969, when Wall Street’s paper-based methods of order processing couldn’t keep up with each day’s orders to buy and sell stock. Computerized stock-execution saved Wall Street (and made program trading and Brack Monday possible, too), and computerized cataloguing procedures saved libraries.