Background

One of my earliest assignments was to design and program a library catalog system for the Cape Town Provincial Library using the ICL 2900 series and ICL 1500 series computers. I wrote the program to print the card catalog on a dot matrix printer and store the details in a database. This was the first effort to computerize in Cape Town, South Africa in 1976.

I was especially motivated because of my interest in libraries and have consistently found libraries to catalog through the years. I have computerized the library cataloging and labeling system including printing the barcodes and developing bar code reading software for checkout.

I maintain my own library of quotations for my writing and references in an Access Database since I teach MS Office products including maintaining relational databases using MS Access. It is extremely useful to maintain all the card catalog references in an online database.