d as a format
on its own.

In May 1997, the British Library launched OPAC 97 to provide
free online access to the catalogs of its main collections in
London and Boston Spa. It also launched Blaise, an online
bibliographic information service (with a small fee), and
Inside, a catalog of articles from 20,000 journals and 16,000
conferences. As explained on the website at the time: "The
Library's services are based on its outstanding collections,
developed over 250 years, of over one hundred and fifty million
items representing every age of written civilisation, every
written language and every aspect of human thought. At present
individual collections have their own separate catalogues,
often built up around specific subject areas. Many of the
Library's plans for its collections, and for meeting its users'
needs, require the development of a single catalogue database.
This is being pursued in the Library's Corporate Bibliographic
Programme which seeks to address this issue." The "single
catalogue database" was fully operational a few years later.

Another leading effort was the one of the Library of Congress
with its Experimental Search System (ESS). The ESS was "one of
the Library of Congress' first efforts to make selected
cataloging and digital library resources available over the
World Wide Web by means of a single, point-and-click interface.
The interface consists of several search query pages (Basic,
Advanced, Number, and a Browse screen) and several search
results pages (an item list of brief displays and an item full
display), together with brief help files which link directly
from significant words on those pages. By exploiting the
powerful synergies of hyperlinking and a relevancy-ranked
search engine (InQuery from Sovereign Hill Software), we hope
the ESS will provide a new and more intuitive way of searching
the traditional OPAC (Online Public Access Catalog)." (excerpt
from the website in 1998)

Another interesting - and totally different - initiative was
the creation of the Internet Public Library (IPL) by the School
of Information and Library Studies at the University of
Michigan. The IPL went live in March 1995 as the first U.S.
digital public library to serve the internet community, and to
catalog websites and webpages. The librarians' task was to
choose the best documents available on the web, and process
them as library documents for them to be easily accessed from
the IPL website, that acted as