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Cataloguing: The Past Until the early eighties the codification of materials was essentially carried out making use of Cardex systems to manage and track materials in their stores. With the arrival of computers, the old Cardex files were thrown away and this information was carried now on magnetic media. Unfortunately, in the early years of computers, storage capacity was generally governed by physical size. The more storage required, the larger the computer had to be. Another restriction was that for computers to assist with database management, items needed to be converted to a code that the computer could work with. Recent developments in computers have been reduction in size, vastly increased processing speed and massive data storage in small data storage mediums with the ability for quick alpha searches of data. In other words, computers are finally becoming more User friendly. Instead of humans having to adapt to the computer's environment, computers are now more compatible to human requirements. The existing system is one of the older computer technologies and as a result all items carried in the stores are codified. As a result, many items are subjectively, incorrectly, inconsistently or inadequately described and misplaced in the Catalogue, this results in a large number of duplicate stock items. This is about 5 to 25% of all items held by the stores. Going down to the workshop user, reliance is made on little "Black Books" and/or physical stores inspections when trying to find a spare part. How did you Get in such a mess
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