Domsa Károlyné, Fekete Gézáné, Kovács Mária (szerk.): Gondolatok a könyvtárban / Thoughts in the Library (A MTAK közleményei 30. Budapest, 1992)

KÖNYVTÁR ÉS KORSZERŰSÉG – LIBRARY AND MODERNITY

Access to the literature of the social sciences in less familiar languages and from less developed countries. It thus usefiilly supplemented other bibliographies, but the utility was marginal, and it is doubtful if much use was made of it by social scientists. This has now changed. In 1990 the British Library of Political and Economic Science (BLPES - the library of the London School of Economics) took over editorial responsibility for the IBSS, and this provided the opportunity to merge it with the London Bibliography of the Social Sciences. This last bibliography was confined to books, largely the acquisitions of the BLPES. There is thus now a much more comprehensive database, in machine-readable form, which is used to produce not only annual volumes but a monthly bibliography called International Current Awareness Services (ICAS). This is a collection of contents pages of somé 13,000 serials and of collections of papers published in monograph form, with full indexing. IBSS, which covers over 1,500 serials as well as books, and ICAS, with its much wider coverage of serials, complement one another. In due course the database will be accessible online, and this will greatly increase its value - as well, one hopes, as its income, for upon this will ultimately depend the success of the venture. One of the greatest hindrances to good access to the literature is the very inadequate subject indexing of books in bibliographies. It has been interesting to observe that as OPACs (Online Public Access Catalogues) have come into existence the ability that most of them offer to search by keywords in titles has been heavily exploited by users. A few experiments have been conducted that involve putting the contents pages of books into machine-readable form and providing keyword access to them. This is undoubtedly crude, since many chapter headings are not descriptive of their contents, any more than all book titles are. But it is very cheap, and it offers something that was not available before. It is however possible to do much better than this. Detailed subject analysis of books is expensive and time-consuming, but the effort and cost are, page for page, no greater than for the indexing that is already carried out for periodicals. If this were done for all books of scholarly interest, a first rate database should result that would attract a big enough markét to pay for itself, partly by sale of printed products, partly by income from online use. Most academic and research libraries would buy the printed products, just as they buy now many expensive bibliographic tools, somé of them of dubious usefulness. Such a database could form the foundation of a still better system. Contents pages could be digitally scanned and put on to microfilm or optical disc and coded for retrieval, so that they could be called up by searchers as required. A searcher in a bibliography would then be able to consult the contents page of any book he thought might be of interest to him. Ideally, there would be a direct link between the bibliography and the film or disc, but the system would work well enough without that. „ Gondolatok a könyvtárban " 169