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National Round Table on Access to Overseas Monographs Through Australian Libraries

28 August 1998, National Library of Australia


ACCESS TO OVERSEAS MONOGRAPHS - A SCIENCE VIEW

Neville Fletcher
Australian Academy of Science

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Introduction

From the viewpoint of our discussion of access to research literature and scholarly literature - and there is a clear distinction between the two - it is helpful to divide the sciences into two categories, which I will call "universal sciences" and "regional sciences". The universal sciences are those, such as mathematics and physics and molecular biology, that are the same everywhere and that know no geographical distinctions. The regional sciences are those, such as geology or botany or epidemiology, that are firmly linked to a particular geographic region, though of course these sciences also have their global aspects. The distinction is not meant to be one of scientific quality, but refers to the differences between the two research communities and different fashions in the dissemination of information.

Research publication in the universal sciences is dominated by international journals and international conferences. Forty years ago, the major research languages were English, French, German and Russian, and every honours student was required to have an adequate reading knowledge of the first three of these. Russian was a closed book to most people, but most of the really important journals and monographs in Russian were translated into English fairly promptly. Now the situation has changed and virtually everything of importance is published in English. In the case of Russian, the most important scientific journals are translated and published simultaneously in English by societies such as the American Institute of Physics, while the Japanese and Chinese publish their most important journals in English. The most important monographs may indeed be written in the language of the country of origin, but those of particular significance are promptly translated into English.

The situation in the regional sciences is rather different. Much of the information is of interest and importance primarily within its own region, and it makes sense that it is often published in the language of that region. Regional journals are justifiably important, and monographs too may have a regional application, but there is no reason why Australia should maintain a research interest and related research collection for all regions. There are, of course, general principles that apply globally, and these are studied in parallel with integrating studies of the diversity of the planet.

I make these distinctions because they are important in the interpretation of any data on total holdings in Australian libraries, and particularly of the balance between English-language and foreign-language holdings. We are concerned in this discussion with monographs, but similar principles apply to journal holdings as well.

Finally, in this introduction, I should make a point about the word "overseas" in the title. In the sciences there are very few monographs that are published by Australian publishers ¾ those produced by CSIRO and by the Academy of Science, together with a few conference proceedings, represent almost the only exceptions. Most publishers in the sciences are, indeed, multinational, but are included in our classification as "overseas" even if they also have an Australian office.

 

Scientific Monographs

There are basically four types of monograph that need to be considered in the sciences: text books, research monographs, data compilations, and conference proceedings. Let me say a little about each class.

Text books are crystallised knowledge, set out in a form suitable for students. Scientific knowledge is very hierarchical - it is virtually impossible to understand the second-year course of a subject until you have mastered the first-year course, and research journals, particularly in the universal sciences, are virtually unintelligible to undergraduates. For this reason, among others, scientific text books change rather slowly over the years despite the immense rate of advance of scientific knowledge. This is partly because of the nature of scientific understanding - while, with the exception of mathematics, it cannot be proved to be "true", it is, within its domain of applicability, reliable, and remains so. Basic texts, with their subsequent revisions, therefore remain useful and used for decades and they are generally well represented in libraries. In any case, access to text books is not primarily a matter for libraries, as students should generally have their own copies of those that are prescribed.

Research monographs are addressed to researchers in the field, including graduate students. They overlap significantly with text books in purpose, but they can assume in the reader a considerable body of scientific knowledge and technical competence. Their subject matter is located towards the edge of the advancing front of knowledge, and some of them will become rather rapidly out-of-date because of the advance of that knowledge, but most monographs will remain current for more than a decade, and the better ones for longer than that.

Reference compilations of facts, figures and procedures have an even longer lifetime, though many have regular new editions - the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, which runs to about 3000 pages, is now up to about its 80th edition! This monumental size is also common; a quick check of my shelves shows another handbook of 2600 pages and three mathematical compilations of around 1500 pages each. While many researchers or departments may have their own copies of those data compilations closest to their interests, it is clearly important for them to be readily available in their own institution’s library for quick reference.

Finally I should mention conference proceedings, because it is now becoming the fashion in many subjects for new results to be first presented at such meetings, which may attract as many as 5000 participants, and most international conference proceedings are formally published as either a monograph or a journal supplement. Their interest is, in general, rather ephemeral, since the most important developments will be later published in an archival journal and finally crystallised in a monograph, but access to them is important for those not fortunate enough to be able to attend in person.

Australian Library Holdings

The background information prepared by the National Library covers only the fields of agriculture and medicine. Medical research is a rather well-funded in Australia, at least in comparison with the basic sciences, and the same is true for rather different reasons for agriculture. In terms of the division of scientific disciplines that I made above, medicine can be characterised as primarily a universal science, while agriculture is perhaps 50 percent in the regional classification. From the simple point of view of utility and interest, we should therefore expect a greater fractional holding of English-language monographs in the case of medicine than for agriculture, and a similar result for foreign-language monographs.

The figures show that Australian libraries acquire copies of around 70% of all published English-language monographs in the field of medicine, and about 20% of foreign-language monographs, and that these figures have remained substantially unchanged over the past 20 years. These figures are significantly better than the average for all Australian English-language monograph acquisitions, which have declined from about 65% to 55%, though not quite as high as foreign-language monograph acquisitions, which began from a high of 30% and declined only to 25%, over the same period. For reasons that I will come to later, it seems to me that this is probably a quite satisfactory situation. There will always be a reasonable percentage of published monographs in any field that are of low priority for acquisition, and one might hazard a guess, for reasons that will appear later, that around 90% of the significant monographs in medicine are held in some Australian library. Part of the reason for this good result for English-language monographs is, no doubt, the existence of several prestigious and relatively well-funded medical research institutes, in addition to the medical faculties of universities. The relatively low level of foreign-language monograph acquisitions is also understandable, given that English is now the international language of science.

The corresponding figures for agriculture show a decline from about 60% to 50% for English-language and from 20% to 10% for foreign-language monographs over the past 20 years. Certainly these figures appear to be poorer than the average for all monographs, but that is partly to be expected because of the regional nature of much agricultural research, even within the English-speaking world. Again, we might guess that the holdings of significant English-language monographs are much better than these figures suggest. Agriculture is, of course, supported by the considerable library resources of CSIRO, for which it is a prime research area, as well as by university libraries.

The survey of opinion carried out for the Forum in these two areas was disappointing, with only four respondents in medicine and three in agriculture. With such small figures it is impossible to draw reliable conclusions, except perhaps that researchers in medicine and in agriculture have no major concerns about the library system! Indeed, on average the responses did not indicate a perception of any marked difficulty or deterioration, and no respondent indicated difficulty with access to foreign-language monographs.

 

A Physics Survey

Partly because my own field is physics, and partly because the fields covered by the NLA and original NAF surveys did not cover any areas of fundamental science, I carried out my own survey in physics, and the NAF extended their survey to cover this area. Another significant thing about physics in this context is that it might well be classified as an "endangered subject", and has been in this situation worldwide for perhaps as long as ten years. The results are interesting.

To assess acquisitions, I made a list of all new monographs in physics mentioned (not necessarily reviewed) in the book review section of Physics Today for the first three months of 1993, on the basis that the lapse of five years would allow time for acquisition and cataloguing. The list includes only English-language books from publishers having a US office, but in fact this includes most of the significant physics monographs published around the world. Extending the statistics suggests that rather more than 1200 significant physics monographs are published each year, of which a surprising 20% are the proceedings of scientific conferences. Since the total addition of monographs to the NBD is around 100,000 per year, physics appears to represent only about 1- 2% of the English-language publication total.

The important thing for our present purpose is the fraction of these listed monographs now available in Australian libraries. With the assistance of our librarians, most of the monographs in my short list were checked against holdings in Australian libraries. Quite surprisingly, the result was that 88% of the titles checked were held in some Australian library. In more than half the cases there were copies in several libraries. While this does not mean that 88% of all physics monographs are held by Australian libraries collectively, it does imply that about this fraction of significant monographs is held.

This is, indeed, an encouraging result. It suggests that the situation is perhaps not as bad as one might have thought ¾ if this is the result for significant books in physics, might it not be similar for other subjects? My own view is that this is probably true - there is no reason to expect that physicists have been more successful than other scientists, or indeed than researchers in other fields, in persuading their libraries to cater for their needs. Certainly there are many books in any field that are hardly worthy of acquisition by a scholarly or research library!

I do not have any comparable data for foreign-language monographs in physics, but a cursory survey of the shelves in the ANU-RSPhysSE library indicates that the number of foreign-language monographs held is very small, and I would not expect the situation to be different in other physics collections. For the reasons that I outlined earlier, this is not a surprising finding in a "universal" science like physics, and I do not think that it represents a limitation on the usefulness of the library for research.

Physicists also responded to the NAF questionnaire in sufficient numbers that some conclusions of moderate reliability can be drawn - 20 responses, which exceeded all other fields, and was approached only by Classical Languages and Literature, another endangered discipline, with 16 responses! Most physics respondents regarded access to overseas monographs as moderately to very important. This is not surprising, since there are virtually no exclusively Australian monographs in the subject! The library of the local institution provided 64% of monograph requirements, and the remaining needs were satisfied by a mixture of personal purchase and inter-library loan in about the same proportions as in other fields. A majority of respondents reported little or no problem with their needs for foreign-language monographs.

While it is reasonable to generalise conclusions drawn from physics to other areas of basic science, it is more difficult to extrapolate to general conclusions and recommendations, but I shall try to do this in the next section.

 

Australian Library Holdings

Based upon these survey results, it is tempting to conclude that, at least up until a very few years ago, the Australian library system had been very successful in acquiring most of the significant English-language monographs in most fields. The only specific data of which I am aware is that from my own limited survey of the field of physics. This suggests that, while there are undoubtedly many monographs published that have not been acquired, Australian libraries have been acquiring most of the significant monographs in that field. There is no reason to suppose that the same is not true of other fields.

There is, however, one major caveat to this conclusion. All the data in the ANL survey and in my own physics survey refer to monographs published at least several years ago and to acquisitions primarily up to 1995. Since that time available university funds have been drastically reduced, and library acquisitions have taken a large cut. Journal subscriptions have been slashed and monograph purchases curtailed. If there is no concerted repair to this situation, then the picture may look much bleaker in five years’ time.

It is, of course, inconvenient to have to rely on inter-library loan to gain access to monographs, and very few of even the more popular titles on my list had more than 9 copies in Australian libraries. There may, however, be opportunity for coordination in acquisitions policy and continued improvement in the mechanics of inter-library lending.

 

Foreign-language Monographs

While there are clearly some areas, such as Japanese culture and history, in which ready access to foreign language monographs is clearly essential, and in which all researchers can reasonably be assumed to be competent in the foreign language concerned, this is rare in most fields. As I remarked above, science students used to be required to have a modest competence in French and German, but this is no longer required, and foreign language skills are now likely to be possessed by means of family background and to be in languages such as Mandarin or Croatian. In nearly all sciences, therefore, access to foreign-language monographs is a non-issue.

The exception is likely to be in the case of regional sciences where, for some reason, the researcher concerned has chosen a research topic that is based in some non English-speaking area. In a climate of tightening resources, it would seem that the best solution in such cases is not to try to amass an Australian holding, but rather to rely upon some sort of loan arrangement with a library in the area concerned. The exception would be where there is some clear national advantage to be gained from study of original sources from this region and, in such a case, research funds could be sought specifically for this purpose.

 

Electronic Access

Again, the physics community is a good test-case for the possibilities of electronic access to monographs, since major society and commercial publishers in physics have already negotiated agreements by which access is made widely available to full-copy electronic versions of their journals, even for Australian libraries that do not subscribe to the hard-copy version. Physics organisations have also led in the development of preprint access and access to large volumes of numerical data.

While those who work in fields in which such rapid data exchange is essential are strong supporters of the system, and while physics researchers generally are coming to depend to an increasing extent upon access to electronic versions of journals, as libraries are forced to reduce their journal subscriptions, there is very little enthusiasm for the development of a similar system for books. Physicists, like the equally endangered classicists, regard the book as one of the greatest inventions of humanity, and one that will not easily be superseded. Certainly, the "electronic book" will appear in due course, along with a convenient hand-held pseudo-book with which to display it, but that time is not yet.

Despite this comment, and recognising that the word "monographs" is meant to encompass more than books, it is certainly appropriate to look towards electronic access to many data collections, as is indeed done today in many branches of science. My 2000 page "handbooks" of data and tables could well be replaced with no loss to anyone!

 

Conclusion

Although, from the viewpoint of a typical scientist, journals are the prime means of scientific communication and archival record, books are a vital and convenient source of carefully considered information, and will remain so for a very long time. Although the data is shaky, it seems that Australian libraries have done a remarkably good job in acquiring English-language monographs in most areas of science, and these monographs are the prime resources needed in addition to journals. Foreign-language monographs in science are seen as far less important, because of the world-wide dominance of English as the language of scientific communication, though there may be special cases for their acquisition for some of the regional sciences.

Against this generally cheerful background, we note that the fractional acquisition rate for monographs has been declining steadily over the past decade, and current cuts to university budgets may accelerate this trend. This argues for a coordinated acquisition policy among the libraries of Australian universities and research agencies, together with refinement of the inter-library loan system to provide maximum efficiency.

 

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Sevilay Esat and Annette Styles for their assistance with the survey of physics monograph holdings.


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Last Updated 16 September 1998