SCHOLARSHIP, RESEARCH LIBRARIES, AND FOREIGN PUBLISHING IN THE 1990s

The reports in the gopher were prepared as part of the ARL Foreign Acquisitions Project, a three-year study of the problems in acquiring and making accessible research materials published overseas. Support for the project is provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. ARL worked with all major area studies library associations and committees in the assessment of acquisition trends in broad world areas or in specific countries. All the reports included have been prepared by specially appointed task forces that were established under the aegis of area studies library associations. Each task force worked with ARL staff and generally investigated several areas outlined below. The intent was to synthesize available information that would highlight the problems related to acquisitions from specific foreign areas as well as to propose strategies for increased cooperative programs. The general areas covered in the reports include:

• 1. Current trends in publishing, including estimates of output by country, price forecasts, and significant future developments.
  
• 2. Description and analysis of historic and current collecting patterns by research libraries with special emphasis on changes in collecting patterns in research libraries.
  
• 3. Analysis of library responses to price trends and budget growth patterns.
  
• 4. Trends in scholarly research.

In addition, two task forces were charged to undertake an in- depth study of strengths and weaknesses of Western European political science and German political science collections respectively.

Many of the reports have been printed in the publications of the respective area studies library associations and committees. Please contact Jutta Reed-Scott (jutta@cni.org) if you have any questions.

REPORT OF THE ARL GERMAN POLITICAL SCIENCE PROJECT

Michael P. Olson, Harvard University Library
James Henry Spohrer, University of California, Berkeley

At its midwinter 1992 meeting in Denver, the Western European Specialists Section of ACRL proposed a joint project with the Association of Research Libraries to survey recent collecting by U.S. research libraries in the field of German political science. The purpose of the project was to identify both the level and the chronological tendencies of national collecting efforts in this field, and to develop a methodology which might be used to survey other fields in future as well.

At the invitation of the ARL and with the invaluable support of Jutta Reed-Scott, Michael Olson of UCLA and James H. Spohrer of UC Berkeley designed and implemented a project over the next eighteen months which provides summary information on U.S. library holdings for a large sample of German political science materials from the period 1985- 1992. A brief description of the methodology and a summary of the results follow.

Methodology

One of the secondary goals of the project was to develop a method for measuring U.S. research library holdings which could potentially be applied to many different subject and language areas; for this purpose the project's investigators chose to use the CD-ROM version of the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie (called "DB-Aktuell") which covers the period 1985 to the present, since it provides both a very complete view of German bibliography during that period and the ability to search the database by relatively precise subject and keyword categories. In the first phase of the project, the investigators used keyword searching under truncations of "Politik" and "politische" and found approximately 11,500 entries; as a check of validity they also used the subject classification feature of DB- Aktuell and identified a slightly smaller number of titles (around 10,600) under rubric 16 of the DNB, "Politik." Since rubric 16 is somewhat idiosyncratic by U.S. standards (including many titles which generally are classed in other subject categories in U.S. research libraries--such as editions and commentaries on Aristotle's Politics), and since cross- disciplinary materials (which could only appear in one rubric in the DNB, and not necessarily under "Politik"), the investigators chose to use the list produced by keyword searching as their publishing universe.

From the original list of some 11,500 titles, the next step was to select randomly around 1,000 titles, which formed the basis for a review by the investigators designed to reduce the final list to 600-700 titles--the number proposed by the ARL executive office as representing a statistically valid (and realistic) number, to be searched extensively. The reduction of the original list was accomplished by applying the following criteria:

• Years covered: 1985-92.
• Languages: all represented in the DB-Aktuell.
• Subject: political science (i.e., false drops from keyword searching were eliminated).
• Country of publication: any German-speaking country.
• Editions: any, but only one of a given work.
• Authors: up to three by a given author.

In addition, the investigators assigned the titles in the list to one of six categories, as follows:

• A. Important works for any U.S. research library with an interest in German politics.
• B. Important works which should be held by at least one U.S. research library.
• C. Titles in relevant subjects which need not be held by any U.S. research library.
• D. Nonrelevant titles.
• E. Relevant English-language titles.
• F. Relevant titles in languages other than German or English.

The 660 titles in the resulting list were first checked by ARL staff against national holdings using OCLC and RLIN, and then by a group of librarians at nine U.S. research libraries (Virginia, Cornell, Wisconsin, Brigham Young, Harvard, Pennsylvania, the Library of Congress, UCLA and Berkeley; Cambridge University also checked its holdings, but its results have not been included in the present survey) to identify local holdings in backlogs or incompletely catalogued collections which were not reflected in the national utilities.

SUMMARY RESULTS

The results of the first check of RLIN and OCLC holdings performed by ARL produced the following results in each of the six categories enumerated above:

• A: 83 of 106 titles held in RLIN or OCLC (78.3%).
• B: 181 of 296 titles held (61.1%).
• C: 48 of 184 held (26%).
• D: 9 of 28 held (32%).
• E. 23 of 39 held (58.9%).
• F. 4 of 15 held (26.7%).

The second bibliographic check was conducted by sending the nine participating libraries annotated lists showing the titles NOT found in the RLIN and OCLC checking, with a request to identify local holdings not represented in the national bibliographic utilities. The number of additional titles found, and the subsequently higher final holdings percentages for each category, were as follows:

• A: 8 new titles found; final total 85.8%.
• B: 45 new titles found; final total 76.6%.
• C: 28 new titles found; final total 41.3%.
• D: 11 new titles found; final total 71.4%.
• E: 9 new titles found; final total 82.1%.
• F: 6 new titles found; final total 66.6%.

INITIAL INTERPRETATION OF DATA

The data suggest that U.S. research library collecting for German political science for the period under consideration falls short of adequacy in every significant category (A, B, E and F), and that in the category representing materials which were (in the opinion of the investigators, at least) nonessential, libraries nonetheless collected over 40% of the sample. In the most important single category (A), nearly fifteen percent of the materials are not represented in either the national bibliographic utilities or the local holdings of a significant number of the nation's largest research collections; for the second tier of materials (B) the figure is nearly twenty-five percent. Even collecting of English-language materials (E), while statistically less valid due to the small sample, appears to fall short of adequacy, as does third-language collecting (F) even more dramatically.

NEXT STEPS IN THE PROJECT

The next step the investigators foresee is to proceed to a more intensive analysis of the holdings data according to other criteria which will be of interest to bibliographers and those concerned with national bibliographic resources in the field under consideration. A year-by-year analysis will be important for identifying any trends in the frequency or infrequency of holdings, as will be a geographical distribution analysis of the holdings. Some further analysis of the OCLC and RLIN holdings to indicate the frequencies with which individual titles are held by multiple institutions is also in order. Additionally, the data regarding Cambridge's local holdings need to be reflected as an addendum to the overall results

. The investigators also concur with the recommendation of the American Association of Universities that German language acquisitions should be a test field for the development of a distributed, networked program for foreign acquisitions, and would like to offer their support in the development and implementaton of such a project.

We would like to express our profound thanks to Jutta Reed-Scott and Anastasia Leshinksy of ARL, and to David Lowe, Barbara Halporn, Margrit Krewson, Stephen Lehmann, Sarah How, Richard Hacken, Erwin Welsch and Jim Campbell of WESS for their suggestions and participation. We would also like to acknowledge the leading role which Barbara Walden has played in organizing and stimulating the discussion relative to this project.