German Resources Project
North American Acquisition of German Titles Found in Die Deutsche Bibliothek Catalog
Compiled for the June 25, 1998 German Resources Project Meeting
"Access to Information Resources Through ARL-German Collaboration”
Library of Congress, Washington D.C
American Institute for Contemporary German Studies
The following survey is intended to demonstrate how many of the German publications in the Fields Politics and Economic History are bought and cataloged by American Research Libraries.
The publications included are taken from the Z39.50 Gateway to the Die Deutsche Bibliothek (DDB) Catalogue on the World Wide Web (WWW). The query was created for the Subject Field Numbers used by the DDB and limited to the publishing date 1995. By choosing 1995, there should have been sufficient time for North American Libraries to acquire and catalogue the German publications
The first 2000 displayed titles were printed out (see column A) and checked in OCLC and, after that, in RLIN. The double check was made because some of the Libraries just catalog into OCLC but not into RLIN and vice versa.
After switching from the WWW version of the DDB catalog to the Z-Navigator the elimination of duplicates was possible (column B) and the number of titles that could be classified as "Valid Titles" (column C) decreased.
The use of the DDB catalog gave the opportunity to display materials that were published by a publishing house as well as materials that were published by institutions, companies, etc. (gray literature).
SUMMARY: The study suggests some sobering findings. A significant number of core titles are not being acquired and cataloged by North American libraries. The earlier thoughts that many German titles may be languishing in cataloging backlogs may not be true. Two earlier studies in the 1980s and the 1990s reached the same conclusions. Thus, three studies suggest that North American Libraries are generally not acquiring significant number of German materials.
Other studies are available on the World Wide Web:
