RCA's decision to abandon the videodisk player business does not signal an end for videodisk technology in libraries. True, libraries which had looked to the medium to provide a more durable alternative to videotape for educational and entertainment programs may need to reassess the relative merits of the technologies. But even in this area, the disk is by no means dead. The capacitance format promoted by RCA was that which offered the fewest advantages in terms of durability, and stop-frame and programming capabilities. The laser disks being promoted by player manufacturers such as Pioneer offer these capabilities (see LSN Vol. II, No. 10, October 1982, p. 74) and thus may be better able to withstand the competition from video cassette recorders. The plummeting costs of video cassette recorders and their recording capabilities were significant factors in RCA's withdrawal from the disk market.
However, it is not as an entertainment medium that the disk technology is expected to itself influence libraries, but rather as a relatively inexpensive machine-readable data storage and dissemination device. Such applications are being developed for the laser disks, not the capacitance disks promoted by RCA. As reported in "Tidbits from Online '84" in this issue of LSN, interest in video disk as a medium for data storage remains high. Data encoded on laser disks can be accessed and retrieved using consumer laser videodisk players, special accessing software and a microcomputer.
Libraries will, have their first opportunity to see an operational system based on this application at the upcoming annual meeting of the American Library Association in Dallas. Library Systems and Services Inc., has announced that its new BiblioFile product will be on display at the meeting. BiblioFile provides access to the complete Library of Congress MARC data base and The Library Corporation's ANY-BOOK acquisitions data base of more than one million English Language records and 20,000 publishers' names and addresses. The records are stored on laser videodisk. Indexes by author, title, ISBN, LCCN and title keyword are also stored on the disk. The disk will be updated and reissued each month. The data is accessed using a standard laser videodisk player. The BiblioFile system is desktop sized and is completely self contained. Its first application will be as data support for LSSI's MiniMARC system (see LSN Vol. IV, No. 3, March 1984)
[Contact: Library Systems and Services Inc., 1395 Piccard Drive, Suite 100, Rockville, MD 20850 (301) 258-0200.]
