Mutilation is an enduring problem faced by librarians worldwide. The authors in this study investigate how both main and departmental art libraries at academic ARL institutions in the United States handle one specific type of damaged materials --mutilated art books. Findings reveal that librarians at surveyed ARL libraries report a problem with mutilated art books almost universally. These librarians have developed a number of strategies for dealing with damaged art books, ranging from ignoring the mutilation to replacing the book to restricting future access to the item. Factors such as cost, importance of the work, and amount of mutilation help librarians decide what actions will be taken on mutilated art materials. Few libraries have color photocopiers available for patron use and rely more heavily on black-and-white photocopies than color photocopies for replacement pages.
Interlibrary loan use patterns for scientists at the University of Albany, SUNY, were determined by analyzing one year's worth of filled interlibrary loan (ILL) requests for journal articles. Differences were observed among scientific disciplines in their reliance on ILL to obtain journal articles, with biology requesting the most (54%) and geology the least (1%). Most requests were made for only 1 or 2 articles. Individual journal titles were generally requested only once (79.9%). The majority of requests were for journal articles published in the ten years prior to the study, although 21% were for earlier materials. At the University at Albany, scientists are actively using electronic indexing and abstracting tools to identify journal articles (48%), although printed and other resources remain an important component of identification (32%).
Cataloging policy at the University of Alabama Libraries allows the acceptance of LC classification call numbers from OCLC cataloging copy into the local database without shelflisting. In this study, we measured error rates for locally unshelflisted samples and a control group of locally assigned and shelflisted call numbers to determine whether this policy produces disarrangement of the local online shelflist. The results show no significant differences between samples, indicating that catalogers' task of local shelflisting is not a cost-effective use of their time. An analysis of the error data suggests that the types of disorder created by shelflisting errors would not impede the retrieval of items while subject browsing, but further study is needed to confirm this.
As librarians at Ball State University Libraries prepared to implement the authority control module of its automated system, little information about the dependability of the module or its effectiveness as compared to the active system of providing authority control was available. The head of cataloging decided that it would be advisable to compare the effectiveness of the pre-cataloging authority control procedures in place with the post-cataloging authority control procedures that could be provided through the NOTIS reports. The two systems would be run concurrently during the test period. To test the effectiveness of each form of authority control, the Authority Control Librarian compared the number and type of established headings for which local authority records would be added using the pre-cataloging procedures to the number and type of established headings for which local authority records would be added using the report system. The test, as expected, revealed that in most respects the post-cataloging authority control procedures provide as much or more in the way of authority control than the front-end procedures, and that their uses reduce redundancy and increase efficiency.