Computerizing Subscription to Periodicals with Unix Primitives

Abstract

Of all the activities in library automation, handling subscription to periodicals is definitely the most challenging. It involves some of the most complex computing. In the absence of a satisfactory commercial system, the authors have worked out, by self-help, a design and used it successfully at experimental level. Uniquely, of all the popular programming languages, the authors have used some of the Unix OS primitives to code this project. At the end, the authors present examples of data structure and some of the program subroutines operating on it.