This brief article describes one librarian’s use of dBASE II for handling troublesome items in small libraries: articles, offprints, photocopies, and so on. The software is described in one of his citations. Armstrong is interested in describing only the user view of a system, which may be a small library’s first introduction to computers. His illustrations show it to be capable of handling the odds and sods he mentions, but also England’s major bibliographic database, BLAISE. (I have never seen what BLAISE stands for, but presumably BL is for British Library.)

Armstrong has searched the literature for dBASE II applications for libraries and found only eight. Thus, he has filled the gap. From the point of view of a small library, such as those staffed by graduates of Welsh library schools, this article may shed some interesting light. To computer professionals, its message can only be that someone ought to consider problems such as the small librarians, since the emphasis is on effectiveness with little expense. But it would seem that his solution is an addition to a card catalogue, not an integrated replacement. While the dBASE system can search on any title word or keyword, the card catalogue is mainly still title and author.

While Armstrong’s solution is inexpensive, it is also chosen for an operating system (CP/M) and a database package that are soon to disappear, leaving the small library with some painful conversion. This is a good first article for someone interested in improving the lot of humanities computing at the low end.