Aspects of the problems of bibliographic access to university library collections

Abstract

The exponential growth of knowledge and the consequent proliferation of all forms of publication that university libraries must, as far as possible, collect in order to meet the rapidly increasing demands of scholarship and research have enormously compounded the problem of providing effective access-physical, bibliographic or intellectual-to librarybased information resources. The traditional taxonomic division of these into the published and unpublished is becoming almost irrelevant, as bibliographic control of both categories of information resources is equally eluding librarians, bibliographers and documentalists. A large part of the problem results from the peculiar nature of the university library itself, which must attempt to collect a myriad of information resources in almost all fields of knowledge. The library’s collecting practices are both eclectic and profound to ensure that its parent institution is able to perform one of its fundamental functionsadvancement of knowledge. J. Periam Danton has appositely noted: “A dominant, indeed, perhaps the dominant characteristic of university libraries is that they are ‘open-ended’ collections; a finite limit cannot, at least in any foreseeable future, be placed upon their ultimate size. This is so because the world of knowledge is constantly expanding, proliferating, fractionating.“1 The needs of research are highly varied and unpredictable. While university libraries are not expected to be able to satisfy them all locally, the institutions must be able to design bibliographic systems or mechanisms to enable their users to tap the information resources of other libraries. In any university community, we can identify these groups of primary