Research Libraries Group Research Articles

Women, Information Technology and Scholarship (Book Review)

College & Research Libraries why should we do less in the next fifty years? Six chapters deal with varieties of technology: the physical environment of the library (lighting, ventilation, and the spread of disease); streamlining library processes (appliances, contrivances, and gadgets); photographic processes; new communications devices (telephone, phonograph, and typewriter); the li- brary and radio; and motion pictures and television. Musmann concludes with a chapter on the future of the li- brary and its technology. This book is indeed an anecdotal his- tory, much of it derived from library periodicals from the century under con- sideration (186Q-1960). The book is full of quotations and comments, footnoted to a fare-thee-well. The style is suffi- ciently informal to be readable, and Musmann does a good job of organiz- ing and commenting on the array of sources. While most of the discussions lack in-depth statistics to place specific anecdotes in context, this weakness is almost certainly a realistic reflection of the library world's sketchy historical record. Do we really know how many libraries had in-house radio broad- casts in 1936-and do we have any idea how many libraries currently circu- late CD-ROMs? After reading this book, I have a much better sense of the field's technological concerns through the century before I began to work in libraries. It has been clear for some time that ongoing change and increasing complexity-the contin- ued importance of print, but also an array of new media and access mechanisms- are the only plausible future for librar- ies. This book reminds us that libraries have never been the stable, unchanging institutions that some people assume, and that there have always been com- mentators looking for a single, simpler future that was never in the cards. If you are concerned about the future of the book and the ability of libraries to cope with the onslaught of technology, you should read this book. Yes, it is library history-but it is history that provides a worthwhile perspective on today' s fash- May1994 ion for doom-crying and self-doubt among librarians.-Walt Crawford, The Research Libraries Group, Mountain View, California. Women, Information Technology and Scholarship. Ed. H. Jeanie Taylor, Cheris Kramarae, and Maureen Eb- ben. Urbana, Ill.: Center for Advanced Study, 1993. 127p., $10 + $2 shipping and handling (ISBN 1-882875-00-1). Academic libraries have succumbed to a romance, indeed an obsession, with technology. Yet how often do we stop to contemplate the profound implications of this information revolution ? Do we ever pause to ask what should be critical questions: Revolution by and for whom ? Do we dare to link this brave new library and information world with our professed commitment to diver- sity and equity? As we welcome the potential of powerful new information technologies and the resulting changes in the nature of scholarly research and practice, we must also pay close atten- tion to the power relations embedded in their development, deployment, and use. All the more welcome, then, is this volume which tackles head on the pro- foundly political nature of information technologies and the implications for university policy. In September 1991, at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, an inter- disciplinary group of thirty-three fac- ulty and academic professionals, including five librarians, gathered around a common goal to help insure that new communications technologies will be structured and used in ways beneficial and equitable for all. Women, Information Technology, and Scholarship, sponsored by the Center for Advanced Study, draws from the first year (1991- 92) of their ongoing colloquium. Four articles by colloquium partici- pants or collaborators anchor the vol- ume, followed by six colloquium digests and an extensive bibliography. In the first article, Maureen Ebben and Cheris Kramarae offer an overview highlight- ing issues of particular concern for women in four key areas: difficulties en-

Collection Evaluation in Women's Studies: One Model for Learning the Process

The one component of collection development most difficult for librarians is the evaluation of the collection. Various methods can be employed to evaluate the collection including statistical analysis, list checking, user opinions, direct observation, and applying standards. All of these methods have strengths and weaknesses, and numerous opinions exist on the value of each method. However, almost all experts agree that libraries need to invest a great deal of time, staff, and budget for any evaluation to be considered valuable. The process becomes even more complex when evaluating interdisciplinary areas such as women's studies. Collection development issues for women's studies has been well covered in the literature, but very little exists on the evaluation of women's studies collections. This article will discuss one method for collection evaluation, the Research Libraries Group (RLG) Conspectus, and outline the process of using the Conspectus to evaluate the women's studies collection at the Pennsylvania State University Libraries. Given the importance of information needs for diversity materials and the number of librarians who select women's studies materials among their many other responsibilities, this information will be valuable for all librarians engaged in interdisciplinary collection development in both public and academic libraries.

Electronic Document Delivery – Towards the Virtual Library

Reduced funding, global competition and technological change are forcing libraries and information centres to turn to new methods of providing services. Publishers of scientific and technical information expect printed journals to remain their primary product for several more years, despite the advent of electronic journals. Library collections will continue to be largely paper‐based, but clients will demand much faster document delivery services from them. Many libraries must also maximize the investment in their collections by expanding their clientele. Electronic scanning of documents coupled with transmission over high‐speed, high‐capacity networks offers a potential solution to these problems. For more than a year, CISTI has been using proprietary imaging workstations to supply documents to one of its branches. Much more flexibility is needed to reach the disparate receiving equipment used by a varied Canadian and international clientele. Describes experience with the Ariel Workstation, developed by the Research Libraries Group, and CISTI′s own work towards a generic imaging workstation, able to transmit to a variety of receivers including identical scanning workstations, other workstations, facsimile machines and microcomputers with facsimile boards. Ability to rationalize library collections is seen as an important consequence.

RLG And NCIP: A Brief Overview And Selected Bibliography

The RLG (Research Libraries Group) conspectus was developed in 1980 by the Collection Management and Development Committee of the Research Libraries Group. The committee was comprised of one representative from each full and associate RLG member institution. David H. Stam served as Chairman of the committee and Paul Mosher served as Vice‐Chairman. Anticipating the challenges of acquisitions budgeting in a period of inflationary pricing for library materials, the committee worked to identify a methodology in which RLG member libraries could better coordinate the growth and management of their collections. The result was the development of the RLG conspectus.

The research libraries group: Making a difference

Operating at the crossroads of higher education, librarianship, technology application, and service delivery, the Research Libraries Group (RLG) is a powerful partner to institutional efforts. For 20 years, it has identified critical research needs, provided responsive solutions, and expanded access to new and untapped information resources. With its highly skilled staff, sophisticated technical resources, and successful track record in managing and supporting interactions among its members, RLG is well positioned to help research institutions address the information challenges of the 1990s.

Library of Congress Joins the Research Libraries Group

Library of Congress Joins the Research Libraries Group

This Just In/News

RLG's New Search System Debuts at Dartmouth Eureka, the new patron‐oriented search service from the Research Libraries Group, was previewed at Dartmouth College in January and will be put through its paces by campus users for the next six months. Dartmouth users will have access to Eureka through the college's campus‐wide information system.

Developing Supplemental Guidelines for Music

Supplemental guidelines are an essential part of a regional conspectus of music collections sponsored by the New York Metropolitan Reference and Research Library Agency (METRO). In devising appropriate guide lines for this field of study, a task force of four music librarians determined that the four principal formats typical of music colleclions (books, periodicals, scores, and recordings) should be suitably individualized, both with respect to the Conspectus code definitions and to the recommended "benchmarks" (i.e., bibliographies and discographies that can be used to assess the quality of collections). Besides writing the guidelines, the task force is proposing changes to the Music Conspectus form in light of nearly a decade's experience since it was first developed by the Research Libraries Group (RLG).

Research Libraries Group: Free 30-day Trials for RLG's Citadel Service

CitaDel is the new article-citation and document-delivery service from the Research Libraries Group (RLG). Through CitaDel, libraries, universities, and other institutions can make citation databases available to their users over a library or campuswide network without having to load and maintain large files locally. Free 30-day trials of CitaDel's citation files are now available to interested institutions.

Humanists at the keyboard: The RLIN database as a scholarly resource

This paper explores the usefulness of the RLIN database to humanist scholars. RLIN is a mega-database that includes the on-line catalogue records of the member libraries of the Research Libraries Group as well as other large bibliographic files. Since 1989 the University of Pennsylvania Library has provided RLIN directly to faculty through the University's fiber optic link to the Internet. Although the contents of RLIN are of direct relevance to the work of many humanist scholars, more widespread use of the database is inhibited by insufficient access to terminals, a messy system of linkages from terminal to database, and an awkard searching interface once one is finally in RLIN. THose faculty, however, who are electronicallly well-connected and confident, competent computer users are finding RLIN an invaluable resource. An understanding of the successes and failures of early efforts, such as Penn's RLIN project, to provide scholars with unmediated access to remote computer files should help managers as they plan for the next generation of information systems

Communication and Cooperation in Psychology Collection Development in a Large University:

This paper describes Selectors with Collection Overlap in Psychology Entente (SCOPE), a group of bibliographers at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, and the process used to identify gaps and overlaps in psychology collection development. The project included informal meetings, the development of a directory, and creation of a worksheet correlating Psychological Abstracts classified headings with call numbers and Research Libraries Group (RLG) conspectus levels. The process is compared to Hale's theoretical framework from library research.

From Research Libraries Group

UMI/Data Courier and the Research Libraries Group (RLG) announce an agreement to offer fixed-cost access to several of UMI/Data Courier's most popular databases. By spring of 1992, searchers on RLIN will be able to access ABI/INFORM, Newspaper Abstracts, Periodical Abstracts, and Dissertation Abstracts for a fixed annual fee.

American Association of Law Libraries. Research Libraries Group. Microform Master Survey: Report on the Survey Form Pretest to the Commission on Preservation and Access

Article American Association of Law Libraries. Research Libraries Group. Microform Master Survey: Report on the Survey Form Pretest to the Commission on Preservation and Access was published on January 1, 1992 in the journal Microform & Digitization Review (volume 21, issue 1).

Automation of bibliographic control for Chinese materials in the United States

The automation of bibliographic control for Chinese materials (along with other East Asian language materials) is significant because of the role this material plays in providing swift access to information internationally, across physical, political and linguistic boundaries. Ten years ago, the Library of Congress (LC) and the Research libraries Group (RLG) initiated a project for seeking means and methods to automate Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) bibliographic records. Today, most East Asian Libraries in North America can process their CJK materials in vernacular languages and scripts in library computers in the same way as Western-language peers had done for years. This paper attempts to review some of the important issues involved in such a movement and the general progress during the last decade. The review which is concerned with the automation of bibliographic control for Chinese materials will emphasize bibliographic utilities in the United States since the automation has been led primarily by East Asian libraries in North America rather than by those in mainland China and Taiwan.

Measures of Social Science Collection Development Costs and Their Relationship to Conspectus Standards:

Costs of books and serials in all fields of scholarship have become an increasingly serious collection development problem for academic libraries, research libraries and others. Factors over which libraries exercise little control, such as diminished Federal and state funding, affect attempts to maintain collections. Although a variety of suggestions have been made to combat such factors as exponentially rising prices for scientific serials, solutions remain unclear. The Research Libraries Group Conspectus suggests that numerical evaluation of collections helps in resource sharing and related collection activities. This article suggests that the method for calculating costs has leaned too heavily on such factors as inflation and too little on changes in book productions by discipline. The impact on collections may therefore have been underestimatedd. Combining the numerical weights of the Conspectus with estimates of publication production and change provides a better way to estimate collection developmen...

A Portrait of Cooperation in the Fine Arts

This aper examines art-related cooperative roups and projects in the 6 nited States and Canada. It profiles t f e Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLISMA), the Washinglon Art Library Resources Committee, and the Art and Architecture Program of the Research Libraries Group and describes their major cooperative projects.

OCLC News

The big news this month was the collapse of negotiations between OCLC and the Research Libraries Group (RLG). More precisely, it was the decision by the RLG board to discontinue the negotiations.

Special Collections in Research Libraries: Problems and Perspectives

‘Special collections’ may comprise rare books, manuscripts, institutional archives, maps and other non-book collections in a library, but the types of groupings are not consistent across different types of library nor across countries. The humanities researcher clearly has a need for material in special collections. Funds for acquisitions and staff are becoming increasingly short at a time when information technology offers new possibilities of accessing and exploiting special collections, including collections held in other libraries and countries. Much progress has been made, especially with automated short-title catalogues; other useful steps include the implementation by the Research Libraries Group in the US of the newly developed MARC format for archives and manuscripts control in the Research Libraries Network and the adoption by the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe of a recommendation on retroconversion. Most of the activity so far is, however, neither well co-cordinated nor adequately resourced. One practical approach might be for European libraries and other repositories to consider the potential for a Latin-language database to be set up with the advice of ‘users’ and potential host-database holders.

Gender, Science, and Technology:

The present bibliography grew out of a need to provide a basic working list for participants in a conference held at the University of California, Davis in April of 1988. Originally consisting of publications of conference participants, it grew from a specialized working document into a more comprehensive monograph bibliography, at first with a simple snowball method; and subsequently, with the aid of two major bibliographic utilities: the University of California's system-wide online catalog (Melvyl), and RLIN (the cataloging database of the Research Libraries Group).

Collection Analysis in Modern Librarianship

Based on findings from a collection analysis project in the humanities conducted at the University of Maryland, the authors present a stratified, multidimensional model designed to facilitate collection management in academic libraries. Building upon the basic structure of the Research Libraries Group's (RLG) Conspectus, this new tool has the flexibility to address the reality of the joint teaching/research mission of a university while offering a standardized framework for cooperative and coordinated collection development. The proposed model accommodates a wide range of collection analysis techniques, from impressionistic descriptive assessments to complex statistical analysis.