Special libraries can be expected to accept and approve the National Program for Library and Information Services although certain aspects of the program are antithetical to the nature of the special library. Traditionally independent, special libraries tend to have a local rather than national orientation and to resist standardization. Although…

In the United States there are 15 to 20 independent research libraries designed to provide the corpus of records necessary to intellectual inquiry in one or more disciplines, in dimensions as complete as possible, and with the optimum provision of scholarly apparatus and physical convenience. The rare nature of much of the collections of these…

This is a general descriptive and comparative report on alternative forms of library catalogs. The specific problems and factors associated with library catalogs are introduced briefly and then treated with respect to the following physical forms: card catalogs, book catalogs, microforms, and on-line catalogs. Whenever possible, examples of…

To aid in controlling the cost of acquisitions in a research library, techniques were developed for the rational selection of serial titles for cancellation. The context for the proposed methodology was a network or multicampus environment rather than an individual library, and it was tested with a specific body of health sciences serial titles in…