Document Serials, Technical Reports, and The National Bibliography

Gillies, Thomas D.

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Description

Title

Document Serials, Technical Reports, and The National Bibliography

Author(s)

Gillies, Thomas D.

Issue Date

1969

Keyword(s)

Serials control systems

Abstract

"Bibliographically, document serials, do not differ substantially from other serials. Their acquisition is largely dependent upon the use of enumerative bibliographies which identify them; their use, upon the subject bibliographies which give some measure of control over their contents. Based on local requirements, every library has its own problems to consider storage, convenient availability, paper quality but bibliographic access is the common need that they all share. If libraries are willing to accept Osborn's definition that ""on practical grounds a serial can be defined as any item which lends itself to serial treatment in a library,"" 1 then a great bulk of government document publication falls into the province of this conference. One reasonable estimate, based on a university library's receipts of documents, is that ""80 percent of the material published by the United States government is serial in nature.""2 It is safe to assume that a comparable percentage pertains in most large libraries for state and foreign government acquisition. While today there are many bibliographic aids for serials and for documents that were not available a few years ago, the acquisition librarian's and the serial records librarian's approach to document serials whether for serial titles or for individual issues is often far from direct or automatic. Librarians are fortunate to have New Serial Titles from 1950, which gives far better coverage of state, federal, and foreign documents than the Union List Serials did, but as with any cooperative compilation, librarians must be grateful for what they find, and philosophic about what they do not find."

Publisher

Graduate School of Library Science. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Series/Report Name or Number

Allerton Park Institute (16th : 1969)

ISSN

0536-4604

Type of Resource

text

Language

en

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Copyright and License Information

Copyright owned by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. 1969.

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