The rehabilitation of physically disabled persons is an expanding and interdisciplinary field, and the literature an this topic has grown rapidly in recent years. Bibliographic control of rehabilitation literature is poor, and selection of materials about physically disabled persons can be a difficult undertaking. The present article describes and evaluates various selection tools on the basis of their coverage of rehabilitation literature and their usefulness to academic, public, and special librarians.
Although 1980 saw hundreds of librarians gathering for meetings devoted to
one or more aspects of collection development, the topics discussed represented,
for the most part, new variations on old themes. This reviewer suggested last
year that attitudes about collection development, as well as the procedures
used, were being adjusted in response to the declining financial resources of
most libraries. Events of 1980 furnish additional support for this contention.
Doing the best possible job with the money available is the underlying theme
of much that happened in 1980, which was a time of widespread staff involvement
in planning and policy formulation, both locally and in resource-sharing organizations;
continued controversy about the methods and value of user studies and other
quantitative approaches to collection evaluation; renewed searching for more
efficient acquisition systems; and increased efforts to preserve what has already
been collected.
The review that follows will consider first the activities of the federal government
and the publishing industry which helped to set the environment within which
libraries operated in 1980. Following that, the topics of collection rationalization,
materials budgeting, user studies and collection analysis, resource sharing,
acquisitions methods, preservation, and security will be discussed in terms
of key issues, major events, and representative publications.
As in previous years this review concentrates on new product announcements and published studies in the fields of micrographics, full-size document reproduction, and video technology. The review is not exhaustive but interpretive. It attempts to identify trends of significance for the present and future of information processing.
Whatever their duties or special interests, most library professionals will consider the advent of a major new catalog code, with its attendant repercussions in staff training, user orientation, tile maintenance, and bibliographic control, to be a matter of pertinence and concern both within and beyond their individual institutions. For their information and benefit, the publications of 1980 in the field of descriptive cataloging have attempted to appraise, annotate, interpret, and elaborate on the code itself; to provide guidance for the necessary preparation of library staff and catalog users; and to offer the observations of research as well as conclusions drawn from practical experience on the effects of putting the new code into practice. Machine-based catalog formats continued to form a topic of major interest in the literature: and among the activities of the year some tentative steps were taken toward and also away from the ultimate development of a national bibliographic network.
From a single vantage point it is difficult to determine what is going on in the library world with regard to serials in any given year or in any given place. However, by combining information gained from the serials literature of 1980 with that known by personal observation, it has been possible to identify at least some of the concerns of serials librarians and obtain hints of events and projects that may be of interest to them.
Collection analysis requires understanding of the needs of users as well as of the content of the collection. College and university library collections should meet the teaching and research requirements of their faculties and students. The author outlines a method for translating the curriculum into usable information for collection analysis.