Re: RAND publications (Kate Herzog) ANN ERCELAWN 06 Dec 1993 15:38 UTC
Date: 06 Dec 1993 09:07:25 -0500 (EST) From: "Kate Herzog, Univ. at Buffalo" <UNLKH@UBVM.BITNET> Subject: RE: RAND publications On Thu, 2 Dec 1993 16:41:01 EDT Kevin M Randall said: Northwestern, like many other libraries, receives the Rand report series on deposit. One man's tech report is another man's monograph. Some are gold; some are base metal. Therefore, the answers to Kevin's questions lie in Northwestern's collection development policy toward tech reports in general, the library's treatment of other tr series, and upon the needs of the library's users. > >Some issues are: > >1. Selection (shall we keep all or only some of the pieces we >receive?) Have you kept all of the pieces up to now? Do you have any sense of their use? Rand research is multidisciplinary, to say the least. Are all the reports going to be housed in one library? Or would you send them to different libraries, depending on their subject? Obviously, Rand offers these series on deposit with the expectation that the pieces will be kept and made available to patrons who need them. This is not an inexpensive venture on their part. And, your decision about keeping the series together and in one place is related to a decision to keep all of the pieces or some of them. > >2. Cataloging (shall the pieces in a series be classed together >or separately? if together, shall the monographs be analyzed?) >(nearly all of the serial and monograph titles appear to be on >OCLC, so the issues are staff processing time and patron access, >not the availability of copy) This is where my "one man's tr is another man's monograph" idea comes from. If you assume that there is good access to the content of these series via indexes (by the way, Rand also supplies _Selected Rand abstracts_ to you free of charge, which indexes the reports you have in that collection.) How do you treat other tech report series? Open entry, serial cataloging assumes a complete (or almost complete) run. I'm sure there are other "monographic" series which you treat this way. However, with the advent of bibliographic utilities and contributed cataloging, more and more access (author, title, and subject) to individual tr's has become prevalent. It is still less expensive to catalog the set serially, one time, and to bind it serially than to catalog and bind each piece separately. However, since the users are consulting paper indices less and less frequently, use of grey literature like the Rand reports is improved by providing analytics in an OPAC. In addition, as Kevin indicates, there are numerous series. And, if I am not mistaken, some numbers might have limited/classified distribution as per the governmental sponsor's decision. Therefore, it is highly possible/probable that you cannot have a complete run of any of these, which makes serial treatment all the more difficult from the holdings statement perspective. > >3. Binding (shall the pieces in a series be bound together? >shall they be pamphlet bound separately? shall they be hardbound >separately? shall they be shelved unbound?) The binding decision is driven by the cataloging decision which is driven by the retention/collection decision. You can really only bind the series together if you have treated them serially, open entry. If you class them together and analyze them, you should probably at least pamphlet bind them as a preservation treatment. And, if you class them separately, you should bind them as you would other ephemeral materials which are cataloged for the monograph collection. > >I would be very interested in hearing what other libraries that >receive these things are doing--or not doing!--with them. You will find, depending on who responds, that there is no best way to deal with Rand, or other major tech report series. I, for one, would be interested in knowing how you eventually decide to go. Kate S. Herzog, Director Science and Engineering Library University at Buffalo unlkh@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu