When Widener Librarian Marion E. Schoon was given an old, aristocratic French name to research she logged into the College's library database and, after a few skillful search words, unearthed a clue: a historic museum in a town where a French family of the same name might have resided.

That kind if search might seem easy, but the task of making the largest university library system available at the touch of a keyboard in anything but.

About 60 percent of Harvard's current holdings are stored in the library's database Harvard On-Line Library System (HOLLIS). An ambitious retrospective-conversion project, or "recon," aims to put all of Harvard's books on line.

But getting the library system technologically up to par will not necessarily mean easier or improved access to the facts and figures buried in card catalogues.

Librarians, the human resource in the libraries, will now be more likely to rely on databases that are fast and efficient but significantly less complete than card catalogues.

Technology doesn't even guarantee accuracy. With the transfer of information from about five million cards describing Harvard s' holdings to a machine readable form, there will be errors which may mean bits of information transcribed incorrectly will be lost forever.

According to a May article in The New Yorker magazine, the margin of error in the "recon" process is "less than one percent." By this account, about 50,000 records out of five million will be incorrect.

But Heather E. Cole, Librarian of Hilles and Lamont, says the card catalogue system also contains inaccuracies. Cole, who has worked in Harvard libraries for 25 years says she has seen cards misfiled all the time."

Quick and Efficient

Librarian of Harvard College Richard de Gennaro says the conversion from cards to computers in necessary in order to document Harvard's vast holdings quickly and efficiently.

"It's a historic transition that's taking place," says de Gennaro. He added that in the last 200 years, Harvard libraries have moved from book catalogues to card catalogues, and are now turning to computers.

At present Widener Library is slowly reducing its Union card catalogue which contains entries for every work in the College's holdings.

The Union cards have been microfilmed and are still available to readers. Widener still available to readers Widener still houses cards describing its and Pusey's holdings, as well as some works in Houghton Library.

"The conversion was essential for the survival of libraries," De Gennaro says. "It's a pity some catalogues are being thrown away, but some are not worth hanging onto. We're choosing to preserve the public record upstairs as insurance; we're going to keep it for the next five or ten years."

And since Widener acquires about 140,000 volumes a year, de Gennaro says, it was necessary to have a faster method of cataloguing than cards.