• Journal of the Korean Society for information Management
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.151-173
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• 1998

National Union Catalog presupposes an information infrastructure which permits users to identify and locate materials of all the domestic libraries and to share materials among libraries. Recently, there have been developed national union catalog projects in many countries using Z39.50 protocol implementation. In Korea, multi-union catalogs based on the types of libraries, i.e., public, academic, and special libraries, have been constructed separately. The virtual national union catalog which is a decentralized electronically accessible catalog unified by linking the databases of several institutions using Z39.50 is preferable to a union catalog implemented by a single centralized database. In this paper, hybrid union catalog is suggested with mixtures of centralized union catalogs and Z39.50-based distributed search systems for the development of a national union catalog. It is also suggested that the roles of a national library and centers for union catalog, and relationships between two types of institution for making sound ground for implementing the virtual Korean union catalog.