Mary Wilke and Ginger Reilly

Abstract: This overview of the Center for Research Libraries’ collection strengths in the science, technology, and medical (STM) subject areas highlights the nature and origins of the STM collections, early acquisitions, and exchange agreements that have provided a continuous influx of new resources over the years. Specifically, this article focuses on the five core components of the STM collections — science journals, medical monographs, textbooks, dissertations, and resources acquired through CRL’s cooperative acquisition programs — and includes information on traditional and digital preservation activities.

 STM Resources

Now as in the past, tight library budgets and the competition for shelf space play a significant role in library collection policies and priorities. This is especially true in the science, technology, and medical (STM) disciplines, which have grown dramatically in recent years and increasingly demand a larger portion of annual acquisition budgets. CRL members and collection specialists recognized these trends early on and purposefully established collection policies and priorities to relieve local budget pressures; ensure preservation and accessibility of rarely held and other important STM resources from around the world; and, achieve a diversity of resources in key subject areas that would be unattainable by any individual library. CRL’s STM collections exemplify this highly focused collection strategy and purposeful investment in the future.

The STM collections are comprised primarily of science journals, medical monographs, U.S. textbooks, foreign (non-U.S./Canadian) doctoral dissertations, government documents, and microform sets and hardcopy reprints of scientific resources acquired in response to member requests through CRL’s cooperative acquisition programs — the Purchase Proposal, Shared Purchase, and Demand Purchase Programs. These collections enable thousands of researchers and students at the major universities and medical schools throughout the U.S. and Canada to stay abreast of scientific research abroad and access legacy STM materials through simple interlibrary loan requests.

 Early STM Collections

From its founding in 1949 until 1952, CRL served as a receiving repository only, as members transferred from their libraries to the new CRL facility an average of 19 truckloads of materials per year in CRL’s six ton truck. Deposit and donation policies were developed by a committee of collection specialists that became the Collections and Services Advisory Panel (CSAP), a board-appointed committee that continues to guide and prioritize development of CRL collections today. Deposits and donations were accepted from members if the materials were not widely held among participating libraries, were not needed to be widely held, had inherent research value in their indigenous region, or were little used. These criteria have been fine tuned and updated over the years but continue to guide CRL’s deposit, donation, and collection development policy.

Exchange Agreements

CRL first began lending materials in 1953. At the time CRL’s shelves contained 400 linear feet of medical serials and 250,000 foreign dissertations. In the same year it subscribed to 11 Latin American medical journals in exchange for subscriptions to medical journals supplied by a member university. Shortly after, the exchange agreement was transferred from the member institution to CRL. Within a few years CRL had received more than 30 dissertation exchange agreements from four member institutions. Other exchange agreements were transferred to CRL over the years under similar circumstances, including exchanges with numerous European universities and an “annual gift” arrangement with the American Medical Association that netted 700 titles from the Quarterly Cumulative Index Medicus project in its inaugural year.

In 1955 CRL initiated a cooperative collection development effort to ensure that subscriptions for the entire corpus of 4,700 journals abstracted in Chemical Abstracts could be found in at least one member library. This early instance of distributed print archiving remains an active practice at CRL, as evidenced by the national Preserving America’s Print Resources (PAPR) conferences hosted by CRL in 2003 and 2005.

 Science Journals

A majority of CRL’s science journal subscriptions originated between 1956 and 1968 when funds were made available from the National Science Foundation to subscribe to rarely held science and technology titles from around the world. CRL has maintained these subscriptions over the years. This group of early acquisitions includes titles such as Bulletin de la Société de pharmacie de Nancy and Philippine architecture, engineering, & construction record, and represents a steady source of interlibrary loan requests.

During this period CRL negotiated an exchange agreement with the Russian Academy of Sciences for a complete set of materials from 1726 through 1957, and received numerous science and technology titles from the Library of Congress’ Cooperative Acquisitions Programs for South and Southeast Asia.

The original journal subscriptions, the Russian Academy of Science materials, and the technology titles from South and Southeast Asia form the bulk of CRL’s science and technology serial collection. These core serial titles are augmented by a collection of more than 1,000 historical STM titles, including resources such as Anales de la Academia de ciencias medicas, físicas y naturales de la Habana, Deutsches Archiv fur klinische Medizin, Giornale Di Gerontologia, and Medizinische Jahrbücher.

 Medical Monographs

CRL has a collection of more than 3,700 medical monographs that range from books on homeopathic medicine and medical school catalogs, to medical textbooks, K-12 textbooks on health, and state documents containing department of health and state hospital reports.

 Textbook Collection

The textbook collection features more than 12,600 science-related textbooks from CRL’s larger U.S. textbook collection. In addition to its value for tracking the history of science as a discipline, the collection has been used in the classroom by educators to illustrate how science was taught in the past. One teaching professor borrowed textbooks to illustrate how the topic of evolution was interpreted in the twentieth century.

 Dissertations Collection

CRL’s collection of more than 800,000 foreign dissertations encompasses works dating from the eighteenth century to the present and includes more than 300,000 medical dissertations, primarily from research and teaching institutions in Europe and Russia. More than 90 percent of the dissertations date from 1900 to the present. From the beginning the dissertation program focused on collecting non-U.S. and non-Canadian doctoral works only.

The Center’s collection holds great historical value because of the breadth and depth of the collection. For example, the collection includes dissertations by a total of 119 Nobel laureates, with 28 in physiology or medicine. Many of the dissertations are held in only a few overseas libraries. In some cases, such as Werner Arber, winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, the Center holds the only documented copy.

The bibliographic resources contained in the dissertations may yield new avenues of research, as science dissertations typically contain more studies and results than are reported in subsequent articles. CRL’s current collection is comparable in size to those in Europe’s largest universities.

The dissertation collection continues to grow through deposits from CRL members, through exchange programs, primarily with European and Russian universities, and through purchases prompted by the research needs of faculty and graduate students among CRL’s 200-plus member libraries.

University libraries with whom CRL has major deposit programs include the following:

A survey of CRL’s foreign dissertation collection indicates that 68 percent focus on STM resources, and are detailed below:

• 40 percent (ca. 320,000 dissertations) related to medicine
• 16 percent (ca. 128,000 dissertations) related to science
• 6 percent (ca. 48,000 dissertations) related to technology
• 6 percent (ca. 48,000 dissertations) related to agriculture

 Cooperative STM Acquisitions

In addition to serials, monographs, textbooks, and dissertations, CRL has acquired many microform sets and hardcopy reprints of scientific resources through its three cooperative collection programs — Purchase Proposal, Shared Purchase, and Demand Purchase Programs as well.

The three acquisition programs, outlined below, provide a mechanism for cooperative collection activities for STM and all other subject areas.

Purchase Proposal Program

Approximately US$200,000 in new materials has been purchased annually through this program in recent years. The program works as follows:

• Members nominate collections/materials for consideration using an online process.
• CRL staff compiles a ballot of nominated materials and sends to members.
• Nominated collections are ranked by voting members.
• Working from the top of the list, downward, CRL purchases materials until the allocated funds are depleted.
• Once they arrive, the materials are cataloged and the nominating institution is offered first access.

Shared Purchase Program

This program starts where the Purchase Proposal Program leaves off, by working to find buyer groups for items not purchased from the purchase proposal ballot.

• CRL collection staff contact participating members to determine if there is sufficient interest in other ranked items to form buyers groups.
• If so, CRL contributes seed money and the collection staff organizes the group(s) and negotiates the purchase.

Demand Purchase Program

This program is designed to support individual scholars by purchasing materials “on demand” in three categories:

• Newspapers — CRL will purchase needed runs of newspapers, so long as the request augments an existing run of a title held already.
• Dissertations — CRL will endeavor to acquire any doctoral dissertation produced at an institution outside of the U.S. and Canada.
• Archival Material — Limited to material that records the activities of national governments, quasi-governmental agencies, and other institutions and organizations.

 Cooperative Collection Highlights

The following are some examples of materials acquired through the three cooperative collection programs cited above.

Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. Minutes and Correspondence, 1812–1924. This is a set of the papers of the Academy from its founding date through 1924. Includes minutes (1812–1925), correspondence received (1812–1924), correspondence sent (1814–1876), summaries of archival collections, memberships (1812–1924), nominations for membership (1812–1924), and donations (1812–1924). Correspondents include numerous well known specialists in the field, including Franz Boas, Charles Darwin, Edward D. Cope, Mahlon Dickerson, Asa Gray, Edward E. Hale, Ales Hrdlicka, Joseph Leidy, George G. Meade, Titian R. Peale, Boies Penrose, Oren Root, Henry R. Schoolcraft, and Carl Schurz.

Astronomers Royal. Records, 1675-1764. These records are in the Public Record Office of Great Britain, the Royal Greenwich Observatory (PRO RGO 1-3: formerly RGO 1-135). The microfilm set contains the papers of the first three Astronomers Royal:

John Flamsteed, 1675-1719 (RGO 1/1-76);

Edmond Halley, 1720-1742 (RGO 2/1-19);

James Bradley, 1742-1762 (RGO 3/1-45).

Also included are a small number of the papers of Nathaniel Bliss, 1762-1764. The records are sufficiently complete to be representative of the work of the Royal Observatory since its founding in 1675 by King Charles II. They contain observation and computation books, star catalogs, notes, and private and official correspondence.

Books and Manuscripts of John Dee, 1527-1608. Parts 1-8. This set assembles the books and manuscripts in John Dee’s reconstructed library based on Roberts & Watson’s John Dee’s Library Catalogue published by the Bibliographical Society, London, in 1990. Dee was a pioneer of scientific exploration in Renaissance England and an avid collector of contemporary and historic works of scientific value. Manuscripts and books include works by Roger Bacon, Aristotle, Euclid, and a host of other scholars in the Arabic, Hebrew, and Greek schools of thought. These works are the originals from Dee’s library and many contain his own annotations. The collection covers a wide range of subjects, including alchemy, arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, mathematics, medicine, music theory, navigation, numerology, the Occult, optics, rhetoric, and theology.

Newton, Isaac, Sir, 1642-1727. Sir Isaac Newton: Manuscripts and Papers. This set includes the complete collections from Cambridge University Library, King’s College Library, Cambridge and the Jewish National and University Library with other important holdings from Great Britain, Europe, and the U.S.

Plant Taxonomic Literature Microfiche Collection. A core collection of 4,679 important, and often rare, reference works in plant taxonomy, selected by James A. Mears from Stafleu and Cowan’s Taxonomic Literature (second edition).

Material from CRL’s collections have been used in research on such topics as the medical society in nineteenth century Germany; mental illness in Illinois; coal; electrical lighting at the Century of Progress World’s Fair; and, physical culture and health in Great Britain from the late nineteenth century to the present.

 Preservation Standards

CRL is highly regarded in the academic research community for the preservation standards it maintains. In a 2003 Preservation Needs Assessment — funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and conducted by Sherry Byrne, Preservation Librarian at the University of Chicago library — CRL was commended for “immaculate stacks” and for an “excellent job” in pursuing the goal of “an ideal storage environment.”

Digital Delivery and Preservation

Given its mission to both preserve and distribute materials, CRL frequently receives requests for rare and hard to replace materials. At present CRL provides electronic delivery of fragile or irreplaceable materials and articles of 50 pages or fewer. In addition to providing requested materials immediately and in a desktop format, digital delivery also enables fragile and rare materials to be removed from circulation in hardcopy form, thus preserving them.

CRL currently is expanding its capacity to deliver materials electronically, employing a three-track approach suited to the nature of its holdings, the needs of research users, and the economics of the marketplace. The initiative includes a multi-year plan for the strategic conversion of CRL scientific materials on a collection-by-collection basis and for the preservation of born-digital resources.

 Conclusion

For more than 50 years, CRL has provided a sustainable framework for cooperative collection development for the North American research community. While changing with the times, its mission remains the same in collecting, providing access, and preserving important research materials. CRL is actively expanding its capacity to deliver resources digitally and manage born-digital collections, thus ensuring it will meet the changing needs of the next generation of scholars.

About the Authors

Mary Wilke is User Services Librarian at the Center for Research Libraries.
E–mail: wilke [at] crl [dot] edu

Ginger Reilly is Project Assistant at the Center for Research Libraries.

© 2007 Mary Wilke and Ginger Reilly

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