ACRL College & Researc Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

ACRL Chapter News

• The California Chapter, the California Academic and Research Librarians (CARL), held its fall program in Pasadena on December 8. Panelists presented brief remarks on various aspects of reference librarianship, including the use of student assistants, centralization of services, reference evaluation, collection weeding, and humorous aspects of reference librarianship.

• The Eastern New York Chapter/ACRL Fall Conference was held at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, on October 10. Experts led discussions on a variety of topics: integrating reader services and technical services, conservation/preservation of library materials, retrospective conversion, census publications, direct access, weeding collections, reference services in chemistry, and legal reference services.

• The Georgia Chapter held its first official meeting in Macon on October 10-11. Cleo Treadway, past chair of the ACRL Chapters Committee, gave the chapter welcome for ACRL. Sandra Neville was elected Georgia Chapter Section chair of the Georgia Library Association’s College and University Division, and ACRL Chapters representative. Philip Varca, with the Department of Psychology at the University of Georgia, led the discussion of the topic, “Performance Appraisal and Job Descriptions.”

• The Greater New York Metropolitan Area Chapter held its inaugural meeting on November 17 at the New York Public Library. The keynote speaker was ACRL president Millicent D. Abell, whose talk, “The Paperless Librarian,” focused on the impact of technology on academic libraries, and the concept of the institution as a knowledge resource and not merely as an information agency. Terry Belanger, assistant dean of the School of Library Service at Columbia University, presented the proposed constitution and by-laws of the new chapter. Afterwards the members present held a general discussion of the chapter’s objectives and activities.

• The New England Chapter held its fall meeting on October 27 at Bryant College in Smithfield, Rhode Island. A program entitled “Practical Approaches to Preserving Academic Collections covered the topics of proper utilization of the physical facility, the use of proper materials and preventive activities, disaster planning, and the New England Document Conservation Center.

COPYRIGHT SURVEY

The Copyright Office has awarded a contract to King Research, Inc., of Rockville, Maryland, to conduct a survey of libraries, publishers, and users in preparation for the Register of Copyrights’ report to Congress on January 1, 1983, as mandated by subsection 108(i) of the Copyright Act of 1976. The purpose of the study is to gather and analyze data to determine whether Section 108 has achieved a balancing of the rights of creators of copyrighted works and the needs of users who receive or make copies.

The library survey, scheduled to be mailed out in January, will collect background data from 500 public, academic, Federal, and special libraries regarding the reproduction of copyrighted works (by photocopying and related methods of replication) by the library staff on unsupervised machines and on copying machines elsewhere in the surveyed organization. In addition, 200 of the 500 sample libraries will be asked to participate in on-site monitoring of photocopying during three periods in March, June, and September, 1981, by filling out two kinds of forms similar to those used by King in their 1977 library photocopying study: an interlibrary loan request log and a photocopying request log.

Elements in the background survey to the 500 sample libraries include: description of library, number of photocopying machines, photocopy ing revenue, reserve operations, photocopying permission requests, royalty payments, interlibrary borrowing and lending, and patron access.

The publisher survey will sample 150 publishers from each of the following three categories: books, scholarly and scientific journals, and general audience periodicals. Publishers will be surveyed in April-July, 1981. Major areas to be covered include: birth and mortality rates, copying royalty revenue to publishers, copying royalty disbursements to authors, membership in CCC (Copyright Clearance Center), proportion of works in CCC, individual vs. institutional subscription prices, permission requests granted or denied, and journal reprint/tearsheet distribution plans.

Users will be surveyed on-site in twenty-five libraries (distributed among types) in five geographic areas by trained survey personnel. A total of 1,250 library user responses will be gathered using two questionnaire forms: one for interviewing users of unsupervised copying machines and one for library patrons who are returning library materials.

Because of the importance of the King Survey to all interested parties, ACRL is urging all sampled libraries, publishers and users to cooperate to the fullest extent possible in responding to the survey questionnaire.