Selecting for health sciences library collections when budgets falter.

The economic plight of the 1970s often limits the librarian, who should be the final selector, to insufficient funds for acquiring essential publications. The librarian, in addition to making every effort to acquire the best possible collection, must provide access from other libraries, within and outside one's parent institution, to materials not acquired; for this purpose, an effective document delivery network has proved more significant than formal plans for shared acquisitions. Too much is published, but the choices become more manageable with selection criteria that include limiting subject scope and keeping within the English language. In regard to journals, new titles should be added only reluctantly; cancellation lists compiled with the help of selective lists, the librarians' judgment, and users' responses; and newsletters and state journals pruned to a mimimum. As to books, selective lists should be consulted; congress proceedings generally ignored; and reprinted collections, multiple copies, and gifts considered with care. Book reviews are more useful selection aids now that lack of funds causes delays in purchasing than when new titles were acquired promptly with less discrimination. Audiovisual media, although widely pushed, do not replace printed materials, are not of central importance to many faculties, are expensive, and thus comprise a bandwagon which the impoverished library cannot afford to board without extra funding. The less money there is, the more need for a librarian's selection skills.

The need to standardize descriptive cataloging.

Because there are too many ways to describe a book, its presence may not be discovered in a bibliography or catalog. Standardized descriptive cataloging is needed to solve this problem and also to eliminate wasteful duplication of cataloging. The Anglo-American Cataloging Rules and the COSATI Standard disagree on choice of main entry, and the Library of Congress does not follow the AACR all of the time. But the essence of standardized cataloging is widespread availability and general acceptance of the data, regardless of principles followed. Local adaptations in standard cataloging data are necesary, but those which affect all copies of a book, not just unique features of particular copies, must be made available for use by all libraries by correction of the standard cataloging data. The national structure for communicating standard cataloging data today is mainly printed tools, but tomorrow local library terminals on-line to a shared computer data bank may provide the instantaneous access needed. The problem of getting the wider community of library users to standardize their citation practices is more difficult to solve, but hope for improvement lies in making access to standard data easier.

What the Index Medicus indexes, and why.

The main criterion for selecting journals for indexing in Index Medicus, and thereby largely in MEDLARS, is quality. Subject scope varies with the voiced needs of the biomedical community. The Index aims to cover the best journals in all relevant subject fields, but the percentage of journals on a subject indexed depends on the quality of each journal. Country and language coverage depends on quality, even in the case of the best journals of each, although American biases may affect such selection. While a number of guidelines exist for identifying quality journals, information necessary to apply them confidently is often difficult to obtain. The National Library of Medicine is advised by an Ad Hoc Panel on the Selection of Journals for Index Medicus, composed both of NLM officers and extramural members. Criticism has been voiced that too many titles are indexed, compared with titles actually used, but no meaningful statistics of use exist which can identify titles which should be excluded from indexing. Continuing suggestions from users regarding titles indexed would benefit everyone.

Topics in library technology: labeling techniques.

Labels which do not fit on the spines of books should be placed on the upper rather than lower left corner of the front cover, because the upper corner becomes visible first when a volume is tilted from the shelf. None of the past methods of marking call numbers on the spines or covers of books-direct hand lettering by pen, brush, or stylus; affixing cold release characters; embossing by hot type; or gluing labels which are handlettered, typed, or printed-nor even present automatic data processing systems have offered all the advantages of the relatively new Se-Lin labeling system: legibility, reasonable speed of application, automatic protective covering, permanent bonding, and no need for a skilled letterer. Labels seem unaesthetic to some librarians, but their advantages outweigh this consideration. When only one or a few copies of the same call number are required, Se-Lin is the best system now available for libraries marking over 1,000 books a year.