ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

NON-WESTERN COLLECTIONS

Library resources of ninety-six state colleges and universities offering non-Western courses vary from 20,000 to 465,000 volumes, with an average of about 129,000, and annual additions of books and periodicals that relate to non-Western studies amount to 6.3 per cent and 4.2 per cent respectively of current total annual acquisitions, according to a recently published study. Of 132 colleges that answered an inquiry from the Association of State Colleges and Universities, only about onethird responded to a question concerning planned expenditures for developing non- Western holdings of the library; colleges that answered will average just under 8 per cent a year for the next three years, according to the association’s report of the survey.

To the request for colleges to evaluate their holdings as good, adequate, or poor, seventeen of the ninety-six rated their libraries as good, forty-five as adequate, and twenty-one as poor, for instruction. For faculty research, only two colleges rated their libraries as good, and sixty-eight rated them poor.

Institutions which considered their library holdings less than adequate for their present non-Western courses responded in various ways to a request to list their three greatest needs. The majority listed their needs in terms of additional publications in each of three geographic areas, with Africa, Asia in general, and the Slavic and East European area being the most frequently mentioned. A smaller number of colleges expressed their needs in other than geographic terms and included such things as additional funds for more space, more bibliographic specialists, more clerical help, out-ofprint books, foreign documents, monographs and, more frequently than any other one need, more periodicals, according to International Education in the Developing State Colleges and Universities, a report of a study conducted for the ASCU dated November 1966, by Fred F. Harcleroad and Alfred Kilmartin. ■ ■