ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

Publications

NOTICES

• The Boston Theological Institute Library Development Program this spring began publishing a bibliographic newsletter titled Renewals. Through this new publication the BTI librarians are seeking to assist the BTI community in making increasingly critical and creative use of library resources in the context of theological education and ministry. The venture signals the librarians’ concern to augment responsible collections development with active dissemination of information about those growing resources beyond the walls of the actual library.

Popular in style, Renewals highlights the special collections within the BTI libraries, notes significant new purchases and reference tools of special value, discusses library research methods, and answers questions brought to the attention of the librarians. Renewals is addressed to faculty and students of all degree programs, but the tools especially pertinent to master of divinity programs receive the greatest attention.

Two issues were published this spring. Six issues will be published during the next academic year, three each semester.

A sample issue is available without charge to libraries if accompanied by a self-addressed stamped business envelope (#10). A single subscription is $3 annually. Bulk rates also are available for potential distribution in other institutional settings. Address inquiries to BTI Library Development Office, 45 Francis Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138.

• The role of personnel officers in ARL libraries has changed over the past few years due to a growing number of governmental regulations and guidelines, increasing staff needs and demands within a complex organization, and recognition by library leaders of the importance of a committed and well-trained staff. This and other findings of telephone interviews conducted in the spring of 1978 are reported upon in the latest SPEC Kit and Flyer (#45, June 1978) on the Changing Role of the ARL Library Personnel Officer.

The two-page flyer discusses several areas where personnel officers have assumed more responsibilities and briefly discusses future trends. The seventy-six-page kit contains nine documents from ARL member libraries including three reports on changes in personnel functions, three examples of selection and performance evaluation programs, and three examples of staff development and training programs.

Flyer and Kit #45 on the Changing Role of Personnel Officers in ARL Libraries is available for $7.50 to ARL members and SPEC subscribers, and for $15 to all others, prepayment required, from SPEC, Office of Management Studies, Association of Research Libraries, 1527 New Hampshire Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20036.

• The Proceedings from Southeastern Conference on Approaches to Bibliographic Instruction‚ March 16-17‚ 1978‚ have been published by the College of Charleston and are now available for purchase. The conference papers cover several areas of concern in the field of bibliographic instruction: construction of objectives, uses of instructional evaluation, faculty-library communication techniques, grantmanship, and instructional methods. Included in the publication are lectures from several scholars in the field of bibliographic education: James Ward, director of Southeastern Bibliographic Instruction Clearinghouse; Evan Farber, director of Lilly Library, Earlham College; Carla Stoffle, assistant director, University of Wisconsin-Parkside Library; Richard Werking, head of reference, University of Mississippi Library; Laurence Sherrill, associate professor, Pratt Institute, among others.

Copies of the proceedings can be purchased from Continuing Education Office, The College of Charleston, Charleston, SC 29401. The price is $7 per copy and prepayment is required.

• The American Jewish Committee’s William E. Weiner Oral History Library, now the largest Jewish library of its kind in the country, announces the publication of its first catalog of 600 oral memoirs, developed in less than a decade, recording the life and times of American Jews from all walks of life during the twentieth century.

The memoirs represent more than 2,000 taped hours and 61,000 pages of typed transcription. In addition to individual biographies, the library’s program includes special projects handling such issues as “Jews in American politics,” “Jewish participation in civil rights in the 1960s,’’ and a three-generational study of American Jewish women. The project, made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, includes interviews from 250 Holocaust survivors and family members concerning their wartime experiences, their adaptation to life in the United States, and the effects of the Holocaust on their children.

The library is developing cooperative projects with a number of major American colleges and universities, including the Schlesinger Library of Radcliffe College, Yale University School of Music’s oral history program, Schaffer Library at Union College, and the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and is exploring the possibilities of exchanging memoirs with the Free University of Berlin in Germany. It recently has enlarged its research resources to serve as a center of information and a clearinghouse for American Jewish oral history projects across the country.

The catalog is available for $2.50 prepaid from the Weiner Oral History Library, c/o American Jewish Committee, 165 East 56 St., New York, NY 10022.

• Analytical Access: History‚ Resources‚ Needs‚ by Richard J. Hyman, has been published by the Queens College Press. This sixty-eight-page monograph, No. 2 in Queens College Studies in Librarianship, General Editor, Robert A. Colby, can be ordered prepaid for $5 from Campus Store, Queens College, Flushing, NY 11367. Checks should be made out to Campus Store, Queens College.

Dr. Hyman deals with access to units of information within other works: periodicals, newspapers, series, composite and noncomposite books. He traces analytical cataloging, periodical indexing, and abstracting from their beginnings to today’s on-line indexing and abstracting services. He offers practical suggestions for effective utilization, even by computerized libraries, of the many printed indexing and abstracting services and relates them to computerized counterparts.

Dr. Hyman’s monograph is designed as a manual for librarians as well as a text for library school students and instructors in both readers and technical services. Included are illustrations; notes; glossary; chronology; list of the abstracting and indexing services coded in Ulrich's International Periodicals Directory; lists of the data bases available from SDC, DIALOG, and BRS; and an extensive bibliography.

• Libraries and individuals who use them may someday have access to a centralized collection of periodical literature if a plan for a National Periodicals Center, just published by the Council on Library Resources, Inc. (CLR), is put into effect. The 272-page document, A National Periodicals Center Technical Development Plan‚ sets forth the goals, objectives, structure, technical requirements, pricing schedule, and stages of development of such a facility.

In 1977 the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science proposed a periodicals center for the U.S. in its Effective Access to Periodical Literature: A National Program (Washington, D.C., 1977). That document recommended that the Library of Congress assume responsibility for developing, managing, and operating the center. LC asked the Council to put together a technical development plan that could be used by the Library of Congress or any other agency prepared to establish a major periodicals facility. Several foundations contributed to the cost of preparing the plan, which was completed in August 1978 by a CLR project team headed by C. Lee Jones, health sciences librarian at Columbia University.

In his foreword CLR President Warren J. Haas says the plan “is not a formal pronouncement by the Council … but is rather a document for consideration, to be refined if necessary and used without delay to help turn the aspirations long held by librarians and users of libraries into accomplishment.” The document discusses possible new relationships between publishers and a national periodicals center and takes into account requirements of the 1976 copyright law. Implementation and a possible governance structure are also explored.

Copies of A National Periodicals Center Technical Development Plan are available upon request from the Library of Congress, Information Office, Washington, DC 20540.