The RETROCON business is good right now. When I visited O.C.L.C. in September, there were three shifts of sixty operators each, plowing through RETROCONs for about forty different libraries, including, besides Harvard, the Los Angeles Public Library, a consortium of French libraries, Hughes Aircraft, Brown, Queen’s University of Belfast, Northwestern, the library at Kew Gardens, the Cincinnati Public Library, the San Francisco Public Library, and Waseda University in Japan.

Even OCLC, one ofthe very best retrospective-conversion contractors in the business, isbound to make thousands of typos in the course of a huge projectlike the Harvard “recon.”

OCLC owns the largestdatabase of bibliographic information in the world, and it oers aservice called RETROCON, contracting with libraries to transfer oldcatalog cards to “machine-readable form,” at anywhere from ftycents to six dollars per card.