The Card Action. The role of readers' service cards of abstracting journal in the indirect services of the National Technical Library, Hungary

Abstract

During 1982 and 1983 the National Technical Information Centre and Library, OMIKK, has im-proved its abstracting and indexing journal series appearing in Hungarian language. An aspect of the improvement was the introduction of readers' inquiry cards attached to the journal issues. On these cards the reader can mark what services he needs, translation, translation copy, document copy of given items serving as an order for the respective services. From 1985 on, the decoding of the cards and the completion of the appropriate order forms have been performed by the National Technical Library, OMK, a branch of OMIKK. To evaluate the charac-teristic features of the new service, OMK has conducted a survey, It was found that 55.4 per cent of the orders demanded document copy delivery, 17.2 per cent translation copy delivery, 26.8 per cent translation service and the rest interlibrary loans, of the totál of 3308 orders on cards, during 3 months of the survey. High differences in the orders were recorded for the different journals in the series. The orders were placed by 165 organizations receiving one or more abstracting journals. 25 per cent of the interlibrary loan activities of OMK can be expected from about 10 000 cards annually.