The WESS German Social Sciences Working Group met for the first time on February 5, 1995. We reviewed briefly the summary of the meeting of the ARL Working Group on the German Demonstration Project in Washington on December 13, 1994. Jim Spohrer is a member of that group and attended that meeting. Martha Brogan has recently been appointed to that group and will attend future meetings. Both Jim and Martha serve as liaisons to the WESS Working Group. It was suggested that the chair of the WESS Working Group also attend the ARL meetings.
The summary of the ARL meeting suggested several ways that the WESS Working Group could be involved in the German Demonstration Project: 1. devise a methodology for ensuring acquisition of current monographs related to German politics and public life since 1945, 2. review a list of relevant journals drawn up by the Library of Congress, and 3. review a list of German federal government documents. In our meeting the WESS group concentrated on the first of the above, dealing with currently published monographs.
There are several steps to the proposed methodology which evolved from our discussions: first, one has to define the universe of desirable publications; second, the universe has to be narrowed to include only those that are lacking in North American libraries; and third, one has to devise a way to ensure that some or all of these publications will be acquired by North American libraries. The hope would be that a bibliographic list could be created each month of titles that ideally should be owned by North American libraries. This periodic list would be checked, after awhile (two months?), against what had been ordered or acquired by North American libraries. Titles that had not been ordered or acquired would be made available for selection by ARL libraries participating in the Demonstration Project and perhaps other libraries as well. It was suggested that the Center for Research Libraries might also play a role at this point.
We talked about the feasibility of using Harrassowitz as a source for the first step: defining the universe of desirable publications. Harrassowitz is in the process of developing its electronic data base, which will soon be in MARC format. There will be key word access, and possibly also tables of contents. Their records will be loaded into OCLC or RLIN or both. They may also eventually have an on-line vendor file, which would be a separate file that customers could use. But they only supply a small percentage of the titles in Reihe B of the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie, and provide selection slips only (for the most part) for titles that libraries are already receiving on their approval plans. Would they be able to create slips for political science titles that they are not supplying on approval, or include those titles in their online vendor file? And would it be worth their while to do that? Vendors have to make a profit, first of all, and are not in business to announce and make available every publication, especially those produced by institutes and other non book trade organizations. We felt that counting on Harrassowitz to do this would be unrealistic.
The universe of German and German language publications that we would be interested in is probably most comprehensively represented by the Deutsche Bibliographie, Reihe A and Reihe B. Reihe B contains many of the relevant social sciences publications, and was included in the Spohrer/Olson survey. Although the ARL project specifically excludes gray literature, meaning primarily special collection material (loose sheets: handbills, posters, etc.) it was felt that much of the important social sciences material is published outside the book trade, and would therefore be in Reihe B. We talked about having a joint subscription to the DNB tapes, or possibly a subset of them, and getting them mounted somewhere where they could be available to all libraries to see and use. We understand that some of the DB tapes are already owned by the Library of Congress; would there be some way of utilizing this file?
Once the file of desirable titles is created, using Deutsche Bibliographie information, it would need to be compared with the titles ordered by North American libraries in order to see what is lacking. If order records are loaded into RLIN in a timely way, presumably the desiderata list could be run against RLIN order records. If the desiderata list were in a separate place, perhaps participating libraries could make tapes locally of titles ordered that fall within the subject parameters of the study that could then be run against it. Or the list could be searched and annotated. These options are all somewhat problematic. Another option might be to use Harrassowitz at this point. If Harrassowitz is making records primarily for what is being supplied to their approval plan libraries, perhaps their online file could be run against the Deutsche Bibliothek file to eliminate titles already ordered. Then the remaining titles, from the DB, could be made available for North American libraries to see (on the WESS gopher?).
If the titles are available to see on the WESS gopher, or some other server, then any library could decide to buy any number of titles. This would broaden the base of libraries who are buying things needed nationally and help the participating libraries' funds, which they will have committed to this project, go further. Since Jim Spohrer estimated that it could cost as much as $75,000 to $100,000 annually to buy all the monographs that were found to be lacking in the Spohrer/Olson study, every bit of help would be welcome. Any library wanting to order any book would do so and notify whomever is running the project so that the record could be deleted from the file, or marked in some way. Titles that remain unselected could be picked up by libraries participating in the demonstration project, and then, perhaps, reviewed by the Center for Research Libraries for possible purchase.
Every month there would be a new file loaded, and every month a file would be dropped. There would probably be some titles that are not bought, because of lack of funds, or lack of interest, but it is probable that we would collectively not be able to afford all the titles that we are lacking anyway. This plan would allow the libraries to see the titles that are not owned and decide, with specific bibliographic information in hand, which ones are worth getting.
If such a plan is feasible, it could be evaluated after a year or two by repeating the Spohrer/Olson study to see if a higher percentage of desiderata is owned in North American libraries. Whether costs could also be cut locally by having more material to share is another question. In order for this to happen, more sharing of information would have to take place as decisions are being made regarding ordering, or not ordering, titles on the desiderata list.
Library
of Congress
Comments: lcweb@loc.gov
(07/09/97)