The consortium of university research libraries: An experiment in resource sharing in the United Kingdom

In 1982 the librarians of the seven largest university research libraries in the United Kingdom agreed to form a consortium, CURL, in order to share machine readable data. Grants were received from a research foundation and the University Grants Committee, and the establishment of the Joint Academic Network (JANET) enabled computer links to be quickly set up. A Systems Manager, Shirley Perry, was appointed and a database was loaded onto the Manchester Computer Centre Amdahl 5890. Each library provides data on magnetic tapes, and CURL subscribes to British Library and Library of Congress tapes. Access is available by ISBN, LC number, or acronym keys. Libraries can take records by online downloading, receiving tapes, or file transfer to local computers. Next stages will be retrospective conversion and input at ordering stage.     

LCC from UDC: Managing the conversion

The Singapore Polytechnic (SP) Library embarked on the project to convert books and periodicals from the Universal Decimal Classification system to the Library of Congress Classification (LCC) system after benchmarking projects showed that work performance could be improved upon the conversion. Planning began in 2005 with strong support from SP management. It was decided to carry out the project in-house. Internship at the National University of Singapore Library was arranged for one staff to learn the use of LCC and how special collections and issues were handled. Student assistants were recruited to assist in various processes. In addition, 10,000 bibliographic records were outsourced to a vendor to assign LCC call numbers in order to speed up the project. The library collection was converted and re-shelved during the Polytechnic vacation periods from February 2007 to March 2008, with the Library remaining open throughout the period.     

The proposed National Depository Agency and transfer of the Public Documents Library to the National Archives

The period 1972–1974 saw the establishment of the Government Documents Round Table (GODORT) and the Depository Library Council to the Public Printer. This same period also saw the development of the concept of a National Depository Agency, and the transfer to the National Archives of the Public Documents Library which would form the nucleus of the comprehensive retrospective collection of U.S. documents of that proposed agency. This article discusses the origins of the Public Documents Library within the Government Printing Office, its transfer in 1972, and the three subsequent moves ofthat collection. It discusses the role of GODORT in the development of the proposed National Depository Agency, and related Title 44 revision proposals during the 96th Congress. It examines the concerns of GODORT and the Depository Library Council over maintenance and servicing of the Public Documents Library collection by the National Archives, and its relation to a National Depository Agency.     

Catalog File Display

File display-the way in which catalog records are arranged for display-is a principal determinant of access to printed library catalogs, whether they be on cards, on microform, or in book form. In 1980, both the American Library Association and the Library of Congress published new sets of filing rules which represent significant departures from traditional library catalog arrangement in North America. These new rules are analyzed and compared with each other and with their predecessors, the 1956 LC and the 1968 ALA filing rules, on the basis of fundamental attributes of files and filing: (1) the symbols considered in arranging records together with the filing values assigned to them, and (2) the underlying basis of filing-symbols or concepts. Numerous examples of the very different sequences which result in the application of these codes are provided and discussed. The purpose of this paper is to help clarify filing options and thereby to help librarians make more informed choices for the display of their own catalog files.     

自助图书馆及其社会职能的实现——以“城市街区24小时自助图书馆”为例

选取深圳图书馆的城市街区24小时自助图书馆作为研究案例,通过浏览深圳图书馆网站、访谈自助图书馆项目组成员、对自助图书馆的图书进行分类统计等方法,重点探讨自助图书馆在促进公共图书馆之搜集和保存人类文化遗产,开发智力资源和开展社会教育,搜集、整理和传递信息等社会职能中的作用,最后总结其存在的不足并提出改进的建议。     

Freeing Ariel: The Prospero Electronic Document Delivery Project

ABSTRACT

Prospero is an electronic document delivery project initiated by the John A. Prior Health Sciences Library at The Ohio State University resulting in a software program that provides patron access to documents that are transmitted using the Ariel system. Using Prospero, documents no longer have to be manually printed out, packaged, and distributed. Patrons no longer have to come to the library to pick up documents or wait for them to be delivered. Documents can be accessed from wherever patrons have Internet access. This paper provides an overview of the Ariel system, background on the evolution of electronic ILL services, and details the development and features of the Prospero system.     

Government information in Pakistan: a note

The government publications are an unexplored facet of Pakistan librarianship. Ineffective bibliographical control affects their sales and distribution. The publications are sold either directly by the Manager of Publications or through agents. Most libraries catalogue and shelve them as they do books. Some maintain a separate catalogue and a few institutions have a combination of the two approaches. AACR is used. Documents are arranged in alphabetical order by issuing agency, followed by individual titles arranged by year of publication. Special libraries devoted to finance and banking make the most use of government publications. A “Public Documents” course is mandated to be in the curriculum of six library schools in the country, but only the University of Karachi offers this course.     

An Evaluation of Automatically Constructed Hypertexts for Information Retrieval

This paper assesses the retrieval effectiveness of automatically constructed inter-document hypertext links in Information Retrieval (IR). The objectives of the experiments described are to obtain evidence concerning the usefulness of querying and browsing automatically constructed IR hypertexts. Links are built by using IR techniques, as these enable rapid, automatic production of hypertexts from a document collection for accessing the collection itself. These tests are carried out in a laboratory environment and through simulation of link browsing. Results of experiments show that browsing has little impact on the retrieval of relevant documents if used in place of querying or relevance feedback methods, though may be practical if used in combination with them.     

The Origins of the Russian Collection at the Library of Congress (1800–1906)

This article traces the development of the Russian collection at the Library of Congress during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Library of Congress, which was intended to be a small legislative library, initially added books about Russia in English translation and on limited subjects. The purchase of the Jefferson library brought the first Russian-language books to the collection, but the Russian collection would not truly begin to grow until the 1866 Smithsonian Deposit and the development of international exchanges in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The author made heavy use of the many printed Library of Congress catalogs and supplements, as well as archival sources, in the course of this research.     

提供、保存知识,造福人类社会——谈对美国图书馆使命的新感知

美国图书馆事业的发展无疑在世界占据着领先的地位。论文以美国纽约公共图书馆、国会图书馆以及亨廷顿图书馆为例,说明美国的图书馆在履行其使命的过程中所取得的业绩和进展,希望能够对我国图书馆事业的发展起到参考作用。     

The highs and lows of physical browsing: How shelf position affects book usage in academic libraries

In most academic libraries, books are placed on shelves in an order determined by their Library of Congress call number. Many who work in libraries have had the general impression that books that end up on the upper and lower shelves are at a disadvantage for being used. Surprisingly, little research had been done to test this assumption quantitatively. This study sought to address that deficit by measuring 2.25 years of usage statistics of approximately 21,000 books correlated to what shelves they were on.There was a clear preference for in-library use of items stored at the eye level of average patrons. For both checkouts and in-library use, items from the bottom shelf were used the least. When correlated to the different ways books could be discovered and then removed from the shelves, results indicated that physically browsing the shelves biased a patron to choose books at eye level significantly more often and to choose books on the bottom shelf significantly less often.While done in a large, academic library, this research may be useful to any library where books are placed on bookshelves for patrons to browse.     

Government information of,by, and for the people The changing mission of the American Library Association's Public Documents Committee, 1876–1956

Even before the creation of the American Library Association's Government Documents Round Table (GODORT) in 1972, librarians had long distinguished themselves as champions of the people's right of access to government information. In particular, it was the American Library Association's Public Documents Committee, which, during its long tenure from 1876 to 1956, remained the premier organizational body through which the library profession sought to shape government information policies. While the commitment of members of the Public Documents Committee to the goal of open access to government information never wavered, the underlying sense of mission that guided the Committee's work underwent considerable evolution during its history. Whether as genteel reformers of the Gilded Age, patriotic popularizers of the 1920s, or university-oriented social engineers during the Great Depression, Public Documents Committee members crafted a government documents reform agenda that translated a recognizably modern objective into the social and intellectual idiom of the age in which they lived.     

The library of congress surplus book program-a single library's experience

The Library of Congress Surplus Book Program, whereby public and educational institution libraries may obtain free books and serials, is described. After analyzing the intensive use of this program by the University of Texas at Dallas Library during a three-year period from 1984 to 1987, the author concludes the program may not be useful to every library, but that all collection development and acquisitions librarians should be aware of this source.     

湖南地区图书馆联盟的比较和互补性探讨

"湖南文献信息资源共建共享协作网"(HDIRCN)和"湖南高校数字图书馆"(HNADL)是湖南地区图书馆联盟事业发展的两个代表。对两个联盟的发展机制、共享资源、管理机制、服务模式、组织文化等方面进行分析和比较,可从多方面了解它们的发展状况、共建共享机制和两者的不同特点;从互补性探讨中可进一步了解协作网与高校数字图书馆在资源和服务方面的互补性、以及它们与CALIS等其他图书馆联盟在本地区馆际协作与资源共享格局中的分工和互补性关系。     

中小城市图书馆的成人工作少儿化和少儿工作社会化探讨

党的十七大胜利召开后,作为文化事业建设者的图书馆界广大同仁,应该如何响应胡总书记的号召,落实“十七大”提出的任务,兴起社会主义文化建设新高潮,促进图书馆事业的进一步发展,实现文化的大发展大繁荣,这是值得我们深入思考并付诸行动的。笔者在学界首次提出了“成人图书馆少儿化,少儿图书馆社会化”这一观点,并以金华各县市图书馆实践服务数据统计为依据,得到了初步验证,证明这种模式可取,它有助于图书馆事业的繁荣与发展。     

图书馆关联数据的综合管理及其实现

图书馆界对关联数据的研究与应用越来越重视,对于图书馆来说,关联数据的综合管理及其实现显得非常重要。图书馆对关联数据的综合管理主要包括关联数据的挖掘、创建、关联构建、发布、浏览及链接维护等环节,图书馆关联数据的综合管理应该注意数据整合、关联数据的效用以及关联数据的安全性等。     

Critical Views of LCSH- Ten Years Later:

Pauline Cochrane and Monika Kirtland's "Critical Views of LCSH-Library of Congress Subject Headings: A Bibliographic and Bibliometric Essay" published in Cataloging & Classification Quarterly v.1 (2/3) 1982, pp. 71-93 has been widely cited as a source for discussion and complaints about Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). Cochrane and Kirtland cover the literature from 1944 to 1979. The present work provides a critique of the Cochrane/Kirtland study and a survey of the literature concerning the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) during the 1980. The classified bibliography is arranged according to the format of the Cochrane/Kirtland study to facilitate comparison. Criticism of LCSH reiterates the same points over and over again, whether it is sparseness, bias or currency of the subject headings. Significant trends which emerged in the 1980s include an increased emphasis on the use of LCSH as an online searching tool, concern for the syndetic structure of LCSH and the role of subdivisions, as well as repeated calls for the development of coherent standards to ensure LCSH evolves and is applied in a consistent manner.     

关于国内外高校图书馆提供补贴的分析及比较

文章以高校图书馆开展文献传递为切入点，引出文献传递经费补贴概念，作者主要通过对国、内外各高校馆的补贴政策的比较，指出图书馆提供补贴的必要性。在馆际互借和文献传递业务日益扩大的今天，经费补贴将是满足用户需求的最好手段之一。     

A New Scheme for Library Classification

ABSTRACT

This proposed new classification scheme is based on two main elements: hierarchism and binary theory. Hence, it is called Universal Binary Classification (UBC). Some advantages of this classification are highlighted including subject heading development, construction of a thesaurus, and all terms with meaningful features arranged in tabular form that can help researchers, through a semantic process, to find what they need. This classification scheme is fully consistent with the classification of knowledge. The classification of knowledge is also based on hierarchism and binary principle. Finally, a survey on randomly selected books in McLennan Library of McGill University is presented to compare the codes of this new classification with the currently employed Library of Congress Classification (LCC) numbers in the discipline of Library and Information Sciences.     

利用MegaZine 3构建虚拟书平台

特藏资源是每个图书馆区别于其他图书馆并能独立存在的基础。虚拟书可以相对简单、直观而真实地在线展示图书馆的特藏资源,是对传统文件浏览方式的有效补充。为了让读者能够在线欣赏图书馆的特藏资源,北京大学图书馆借助MegaZine 3设计开发虚拟书平台。通过测试,证实MegaZine 3是特藏资源在线展示的一个有效工具。