Diane Hillman's concern recently expressed on law lib has
been my concern of late also. I am a member of the AALL
statistics Committee and therefore have a deep interest in
the use and fairness of the statistics which we all report
to ABA/AALS. I have a particular concern with the
interpretation of question 9, the counting of microform
titles. The definition reads "A title is each item for which
a separate shelf bibliographic unit record has been made or
obtained". The problem word could be "obtained". It is
possible to purchase cataloging records for sets of
microfiche. Such sets are published by LLMC and CIS and the
cataloging can be purchased from CIS or OCLC. When
cataloging is purchased the records are loaded into the
local online catalog and thus each title in the set is
reflected individually in the catalog. This is perfectly
appropriate. However if a library were to purchase the fiche
and the accompanying Guide or Index and count the titles
included in the set as listed in the Guide and then report
that number as titles owned without actually adding the
cataloging for the individual titles to the local catalog -
that would be misleading and give a false number of titles
held for that library.
The same situation is true of question 10 - other non-book
titles- and the databases for LEXIS and Westlaw. It is not
proper to count the files as individual titles in the
collection unless the library has actually added a
bibliographic record for each individual title (file) to the
local catalog.
The title count of the library should reflect the number of
actual bibliographic title records in that library's
catalog, whether online or card.
Comments please.
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