1982 was a year characterized more by reflection and summation of past events than by celebration of great advances. The predictive literature, such as there was, seemed headed in one direction, that of downplaying "collections" and pushing us toward the concept of "access" to resources. The literature and events covered in this review will be divided into the following areas: journal publishing, economic considerations and document delivery; automated systems and bibliographic control; evaluation and use of collections; resource sharing and preservation activities; organization and administration of serials activities.
Although the authors of a major review of five years of subject analysis literature announced early in their article that they were omitting from consideration "subject analysis as typically practiced in academic and public libraries" (Travis, 123) -- the topics normally discussed in these LRTS narratives -- the phrases that reflect their concerns, such as controlled vocabulary, free-text searching, and automated indexing are appearing with increasing frequency in what one might consider the "standard" journals of librarianship and technical services. The typical practice of subject analysis in libraries is changing dramatically as the online catalog becomes more prevalent and more sophisticated.
The year 1982 may have been a transitional one for micrographics. Two professional societies decided to change their names to reflect their orientation toward management systems, while another reorganized to accept personal memberships only. The Library of Congress [LC] announced its intention to give minimal level access to all microforms, and the Association of Research Libraries [ARL] Microform Project acted as liaison for several cooperative microform cataloging projects. Financial problems, meanwhile, forced the National Archives and the Foreign Newspaper Microfilm Project to cut back on their activities. Many bibliographic guides and government documents were issued for the first time in microformat and a few organizations began to test the capability of video/optical discs to store print and nonprint materials. A number of state-of-the-art articles were written on video/optical disc technology while micropublishing proved middle-aged enough to merit a book on its history. King Research's statistical survey of photocopying practices in libraries created considerable controversy and was used by both libraries and publishers in support of their widely differing viewpoints.
Fiscal management and the use of new techniques continued to be principal focuses
of last year's work in resources and collection development, but appearing also
in the literature were questions and commentary about scientific approaches
to what many librarians consider an art. The role of the federal government
in developing library resources was a major concern in the economic climate
of 1982. And the world of publishing is always of interest to the resources
librarian.
Surveys of the field as a whole were few last year. In addition to the annual
review in this journal (Magrill), two deserve mention. The ALA Yearbook offers
a summary of events in collection management (Lynden), while the annotated,
critical bibliography compiled by Godden,* Fachan, and Smith covers books and
articles appearing between 1970 and 1980.