University librarians continue to face the difficult task of determining which journals remain crucial for their collections during these times of static financial resources and escalating journal costs. One evaluative tool, Journal Citation Reports (JCR), recently has become available on CD-ROM, making it simpler for librarians to use its citation data as input for ranking journals. But many librarians remain unconvinced that the global citation data from the JCR bears enough correspondence to their local situation to be useful. In this project, I explore the correlation between global citation data available from JCR with local citation data generated specifically for the University of British Coliimhia, for 20 subject fields in the sciences and social sciences. The significant correlations obtained in this study suggest that large research-oriented university libraries could consider substituting global citation data for local citation data when evaluating their journals, with certain cautions.
Twenty-five years of research in expert systems for descriptive cataloging and related areas are reviewed. Researchers who developed prototype expert cataloging systems in the 1980s found that cataloging rules are extremely comprehensive and complicated, but still insufficient to permit these systems accurate cataloging results. Those researchers also identified smaller areas that need to be pursued for successful implementation of expert cataloging systems. Subsequent research has focused on narrower areas. Cataloging rules were studied and more was learned about problems with their logic structure and organization Another focus was optical reading of bibliographic elements in documents. Categories of responsibility and graphic design continue to pose problems. The visual characteristics of documents were studied to understand more about the automatic recognition of bibliographic elements necessary for the bibliographic description of documents. The systematic study of the cataloging process, necessary for development of expert systems, may result in improvement of manual working procedures and enrich the education of new catalogers.
Current vendor software for authority control is found to generate negative results for nonunique Chinese headings in the local catalog. After authority control, nonunique Chinese names in the bibliographic records are found routinely altered to match authority headings established in the Library of Congress (LC) authority file that are unrelated to the Chinese script of the bibliographic record. Headings with standard diacritics in the Wade-Giles romantization scheme are the most problematic. The name headings that are negatively affected in the authority control services need to be corrected before the LC Pinyin conversion project takes place around the year 2000 to prevent headings from being distorted further in the Pinyin conversion process. In this paper, I examine the reasons why vendor software produces negative results for nonunique Chinese names, and suggest measures for Chinese-Japanese-Korean (CJK) libraries in North America and vendors who supply authority-control services that include CJK data to improve the situation. These include vendor software upgrades, modifications to CJK Name Authority Cooperative procedures, etc. The authority control service at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is used to illustrate the problem.