Sabinet

The South African Bibliographic and Information Network, or Sabinet, is a comprehensive bibliographic service intended to facilitate resource sharing among South African libraries.

Established in 1983, Sabinet aimed to provide South Africa with a joint library network and a national union catalogue.

According to its corporate brochure[1], the original principles behind the organisation included the idea that it should be as simple as possible yet cost effective for all concerned, within the framework of a networked central library and database system. This is still the key motivation.

In 1997 a new private company, Sabinet Online (Pty) Limited, was formed with the objective of addressing the changing needs of the online information community and to keep pace with the rapidly changing technology.

For the purposes of ESAT compilers and users, the key feature of this initiative is the Sabinet Reference Platform, a facility intended to provide a researcher with a single entry point from which to to seamlessly search Sabinet's reference products, which include the African Digital Repository, Navtech, SACat, SACat Plus, SANB (South African National Bibliography), Subsidie and UCTD (the Union Catalogue for Theses and Dissertations)

For summary details on the various services listed above, see the concise SACat Plus document, available at https://cdn.sabinet.co.za/documents/sacatplus.pdf.