>
ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 47| October 2000
Australian Library Collections Task Force
The Australian Library Collections Task Force met on 8 September. Background information on the work of the task force and its membership appeared in the April 2000 issue of Gateways.
There was discussion of the recent seminar (Australias Information Future: Securing the Infrastructure for Research and Innovation) which considered reports on information infrastructure prepared for the Coalition for Innovation in Scholarly Communication. The next meeting of the task force will examine the key papers and outcomes of the CISC forum in more detail.
A major item on the agenda for the September 2000 meeting was a series of reports on serials in Australian libraries. The National Library has been undertaking subject-based reviews of its serials collection, and a short statement on this process, together with the results of the reviews of philosophy and religion serials. A preliminary draft of a report on access to serials in physics and molecular biology, being prepared by Neville Fletcher and Adrian Gibbs, was also made available. It is hoped that the final version of this report will be published by the Library in the near future. Complementing the previous report was a presentation by task force member Klaus Altmann of the CSIRO, reporting on holdings of genetics serials in Australia.
It is apparent from these serials surveys that core serials across a
range of disciplines are widely held in Australian libraries, and many
serials are now available in electronic form. The issues associated with
access to electronic information will be considered at the next meeting,
and include the present low level of reporting electronic holdings in
local catalogues and the National Bibliographic Database, and concerns
about archiving and interlibrary loan of electronic resources. The task
force will meet again in February 2001.
Sandra Henderson
Please address any comments and enquiries to The Editor, Gateways: gateways@nla.gov.au