Institutions which own primary source materials on historical figures encounter many problems when they attempt to provide access to the information for scholars. (LS)

Suggests that fundamental questions with broad policy implications and a perspective that approaches academic library from patron's point of view remain to be asked about library costs, collections and their use, library users, and both the academic setting itself and the people who work within it. Seventeen references are cited. (EJS)

Describes current activities in the acquisition and control of children's literature and calls for a national plan to develop existing collections for a wider scholarly audience. (JB)

Document delivery support for selective dissemination of information (SDI) services provided by the Center for Information Services, University of California at Los Angeles, was measured by the following: (1) Obtaining copies of all steady-state SDI searches from Biological Abstracts'"BA Previews" data base delivered to the University of…

Anticipation of current and future needs of scholars should be a major concern of builders of research collections. This may result in a certain percentage of unused books; however, this is a justified and necessary expense if scholarship and research are to continue. (RAA)

Describes a study that used the OCLC Online Union Catalog to identify those adult fiction books owned by the largest number of public libraries to determine whether a core collection of titles could be identified for use in evaluating adult fiction collections. Future research is recommended and a list of the top 99 titles is appended. (Author/LRW)

In an era of tight library budgets, librarians must carefully consider materials selection. The interdisciplinary nature of the social science and humanities fields makes determining what a researcher needs a difficult task. This study seeks to determine what materials are being used by scholars in the field of Russian and Slavic studies analyzing…

Collection use study is a must if research collections are to meet scholarly needs while competing for scarce financial resources. Such studies will be in harmony with the realities under which academic libraries must operate in the future. (RAA)

Although library buildings often house both library and archival (i.e., manuscript) collections, the approaches to library and manuscript collections are quite different, and obtaining information from libraries and archives involves different processes. In general, libraries maintain published book and periodicals that are duplicated in many…

Presents four challenges faced by libraries and proposes research designs to address each of them. The challenges involve: invisible infrastructure; content and collections; preservation and access; and institutional boundaries. Proposes a mixture of research methods that includes surveys, case studies, documentary analyses, and policy analyses.…

Reports on research that examined the clustering of similar books provided by a classification system and ways in which the books that patrons circulate are clustered in a university library. Measures of classification system performance are suggested and used to evaluate two test collections. Consequences for full-text document systems and online…

Describes study that investigated whether assigning Library of Congress classification numbers to government documents, instead of the Superintendent of Documents classification numbers, would result in a wide scattering of the materials. Implications for the shelf arrangement of government documents are discussed, and further research is…

Reports on a project to provide contextual information about the derivative bibliographic relationship by studying a sample of works from a research library catalog. The research design, the proportion of works that were part of bibliographic families, the constitution of bibliographic families, and directions for further research are presented.…

This study of state university libraries in Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates provides information on library organization and analysis of collections, services, staffing, budgeting, expenditures, automation, and information technology. Suggests further research is needed in collections, services and…

Discussion of journals that are published exclusively in electronic format focuses on the way they affect the communication of scientific information to the research community. Highlights include the impermanence of electronic materials; access; indexing; library holdings; pricing; cataloging; citations; and considerations for further study.…