ACRL News Issue (B) of College & Research Libraries


O ctober 1 9 9 2  /  5 7 5

Annual Conference: Meetings 
for all minds
P a r t 2  o f  o u r  A n n u a l  C o n fe re n c e  
h ighlights

Librarians vs. scholars
“Today’s Libraries Face Tomorrow’s Scholars: 
Faults and Fissures,” sponsored by the Rare 
Books and Manuscripts Section, explored the 
values librarians and scholars share as well as 
the different bits of turf on which they stand.

James P. Michalko, president of RLG, Inc., 
discussed issues related to the recent RLG pu b ­
lication Preferred Futures fo r  Libraries. The pre­
ferred future strongly shared by library direc­
tors and university provosts includes a multimedia 
workstation with access to everything and ev­
eryone online. Michalko did n o t see this in 
anyone’s future, and he cited a recent graffiti: a 
triangle with one word at each comer —“good,” 
“fast,” “cheap”— and the caption “pick any two.” 
An appropriate workstation for humanists would 
be very complex, no one knows how to build 
it, and the relatively small num ber of dollars 
supporting humanistic research will not attract 
commercial development.

At the same time, Michalko warned that the 
competition betw een disciplines for scarce dol­
lars is real and will grow more vigorous as the 
number of electronic products expands and that 
humanists and librarians w ould be wise to col­
laborate in setting priorities and cooperate in 
explaining them to the general public if they 
hope to impact national decisions.

This th e m e w as p ic k e d  u p  by Phyllis 
Franklin, executive director of the Modern Lan­
guage Association, w ho reported the responses 
to questions she had posed to more than 300 
scholars. From this material Franklin concluded 
that “the common ground betw een librarians 
and scholars has shifted: library administrators 
have changed while humanistic scholars have 
remained much the same.” While her respon­
dents urged “full steam ahead into the elec­
tronic era,” three deep concerns emerged. First, 
that microfilming of brittle books has inadvert­
ently come to be seen as a model for handling

other materials as well. Second, Franklin asked 
that w e imagine books will be published until 
2055 and no longer; w hat should be preserved? 
Scholars w ant to preserve as complete a record 
of the 600-year print era as possible and resist 
any attempts to preserve that record in other 
formats or in a relatively small num ber of re­
positories. Third, even the most dedicated lit­
erary theorists spoke eloquently to the “materi­
ality of text” and the impossibility of separating 
content from format. Franklin too saw collabo­
ration as an urgent need.— Sidney F. Huttner, 
University o f Tulsa

…  h e  c ite d  a  recent graffiti: a  
triangle w ith o n e  w o rd  a t each 
c o m e r —  “good, ” “fa st, ” “c h e a p ”-—  
a n d  the c a p tio n  “p i c k  a n y  two. ”

The barriers to inform ation
“Issues in Sci-Tech Information: Librarians’ Right 
to Know” presented by the Science and Tech­
nology Section focused on information barri­
ers confronted by librarians and information 
seekers.

Jane Bortnick of the Congressional Research 
Service discussed trends in sci-tech informa­
tion and resulting policy dilemmas including 
public access, intellectual property rights, pric­
ing formulae, budget constraints, changing in­
stitutional roles, and the need for revising ex­
isting laws and regulations. With policy being 
made in the midst of much uncertainty and the 
government eyeing information as a source of 
revenue, information professionals are under­
standably nervous.

Michael Fry of the University of California- 
Davis described the misuse of information in 
the Exxon Valdez incident as illustrative of “the 
fundamental conflict between those involved 
in litigation and science.” Research assessing 
environmental damage was overseen by gov­
ernm ent officials, attorneys, and others with 
vested interests.



5 7 6  /  C&RL News

Tracey Cosgrove of the Planetree Health Re­
sources Center, cited barriers confronted daily 
by those needing medical information includ­
ing cultural, sexual, and racial biases; language 
differences; problems with NLM subject head­
ings; and collection restrictions.

Other perspectives were provided by Ron 
Rodrigues of Dialog and Ronald Akie of Faxon. 
Rodrigues gave Dialog’s criteria for selecting or 
rejecting databases. Akie introduced his talk on 
the publishing situation in Eastern Europe as 
“a travel guide through utter chaos.”'—Julia 
Zimmerman, Georgia Institute o f Technology

"Cinema Paradise: Movies, Libraries, 
and European Culture"
This Western European Specialists Section pro­
gram informed its audience of 275 about cur­
rent European and American film production, 
current scholarship in film, and archival pres­
ervation and library collections for film study.

Steve Hanson, University of Southern Cali­
fornia Cinema-Television Library, illustrated with 
clips how American movies, and the “global” 
and “Eurofilm,” have supplanted the national 
films of European countries. He predicted that 
European national films will survive for a few 
years but they will be fewer in number and 
more expensive to make. Librarians will have a 
harder time acquiring them for their collections.

Nancy Goldman, Pacific Film Archive, talked 
on the costs of maintaining national film ar­
chives to preserve national cinemas (it might 
exceed $40,000 simply to keep a negative and 
positive print of one film). Her comments on 
film preservation included that over 70 percent 
of all silent films no longer exist in any form.

Anne Schlosser, Warner Bros. Research Li­
brary, characterized two types of film libraries— 
print: collections of film prints or stock footage; 
and paper: materials on paper about film. She 
reviewed the published and unpublished ma­
terials—mostly paperwork that accompanies the 
making of films—they collect. With a handout 
she outlined the strengths of selected American 
institutions and notable European collections.— 
Marcia Pankake, University o f Minnesota

Issues in medical anthropology
In “Medical Anthropology: Choices and Chal­
lenges,” sponsored by the Anthropology and 
Sociology Section and the Science and Tech­
nology Section, M. Margaret Clark described 
the evolution of medical anthropology which 
1) began as a study of the health practices of

indigenous populations; 2) was expanded to 
Western industrialized nations in response to 
the frequent failure of public health programs 
among minority groups; and 3) by the early 
1960s came to include the study of health prac­
tices and policies in their many diverse aspects.

Barbara A. Koenig discussed the anthropol­
ogy of biomedicine and mentioned the book 
Laboratory Life: The Social Construction o f Scien­
tific Factors (Latour, Woolgar, 1979) as seminal 
in breaking the myth of the positivism of sci­
ence. Medical anthropologists work to bring 
daily experience to bear on the theoretical is­
sues of medicine.

In a study of gay men in San Francisco who 
tested HIV positive, speaker Stephen Eyre 
identified four varieties of coping mechanisms: 
1) wholistic healing; 2) a 12-step program, some­
what like that of Alcoholics Anonymous; 3) ac­
tivism; and 4) treatment advocacy. Each ap­
proach provides a sense of control, involves 
judgment, and offers the means for retribution.

Daniel T. Richards discussed the complexi­
ties of collection development. Librarians must 
know clientele needs, know their local collec­
tion, acquire and preserve materials in a wide 
range of formats, share resources, and foster 
cooperative collection development. The dis­
cussion which followed the program centered 
on the failure of the major medical indexes to 
cover the journal literature of medical anthro­
pology.—James W. Williams, University o f Illinois, 
Urbana-Champaign

Access and technology
In the College Library Section program “Alternatives 
to Collection Ownership: College Library Implica­
tions and Applications,” keynoter Ralph Alberico, 
University of Texas at Austin, challenged college 
librarians to view both ownership and electronic 
delivery as forms of access since today’s library 
comprises a set of documents and a set of services, 
not just one or the other. Paying for information is 
now both a matter of paying for packages stored 
on-site and for other forms of access, which to­
gether equal a library’s delivery capacity. Action steps 
for maintaining effectiveness in today’s technologi­
cally advanced environment include building an 
infrastructure to actualize electronic transfer of infor­
mation, seeking alternative forms of budgeting, and 
experimenting with available delivery systems.

Robert Adams (Wesleyan University) and 
Nancy Taylor (Earlham College) presented 
consortial and bibliographic instruction perspec­
tives on the topic. Paul Peters (Coalition for



O ctober 1 9 9 2 / 5 7 7

Networked Information) comforted the group 
with a whimsical but probing look at the evo­
lutionary process of change in the electronic 
access arena, elaborating o n  the Paleo-elec- 
tronic, M esoelectronic, and N eoelectronic 
Ages.—Jonathan D. Lauer, Messiah College

Copyright Law: Beauty a n d  the Beast
In “Developing and Implementing a Copyright 
Policy: Institutional Issues for Academic Librar­
ies,” the ACRL Copyright Committee program, 
k ey n o te sp e ak e r K enneth 
Crews, associate professor of 
business law at San Jose State 
University, used a Beauty a n d  
the Beast analogy to articulate 
his views. Too often interpre­
tation of the Copyright Law 
reflects its “beast” qualities: 
fearsome and domineering.
A m ore “b e a u ty ”-like a p ­
proach would use the flex­
ibility in the law to bring ex­
perience and judgment into 
determining what is fair use 
in a specific situation.

David Carlson, director of 
Triangle Research Library 
Network, related his previous A view o f San Francisco from

Alcatraz Islandexperience in developing a 
library policy regarding software, a process he 
stressed was more simplistic in the retelling. 
Linda Dobb of San Francisco State University 
focused her remarks on the role librarians can 
play in setting policy regarding the dissemina­
tion of electronic information. The use of li­
censing agreements and permission clearing­
houses are exam ples of how  libraries and 
commercial publishers can both m eet their 
needs.

Dennis East of Bowling Green State Univer­
sity concluded the program with “It Happened 
One Day,” a description of what transpires when 
an institution naively considers adopting a 
copyright policy. The complexity of the task 
resulted in an institutional commitment to pro­
vide information on rather than an interpreta­
tion of copyright.— Catherine E. Welsh, Siena 
College, Loudonville, New York

Volunteerism and the nonprofit sector
In “Voluntary Action, Philanthropy, and the Non­
profit Section: Overview and Resources,” spon­
sored by the Law and Political Science Section, 
Jeanne Bohlen, director of the Jeannette Rankin

Library Program at the U.S. Institute of Peace, 
gave an overview of the nonprofit world by 
pointing out that “the voluntary sector is an 
inherent part of American life.” In 1990 there 
were 983,000 nonprofit organizations in the U.S., 
representing a 6.8 percent share of the total 
national income and employing 10.4 percent 
of the working population. While these statis­
tics are impressive, Bohlen and the other speak­
ers emphasized that the nonprofit sector is too 
small to take the place of government action.

Kirke Wilson, executive 
director of the Rosenberg 
Foundation, described the 
complex world of founda­
tions, which play a second­
ary role in the nonprofit sec­
tor since only 10% of the 
money comes from founda­
tions, while 90% comes from 
ind iv id u als. F o u n d atio n s 
can be categorized by type— 

is
av

D. 
.E

M
t: 

di
rec otoh

P
family, community, or cor­
porate—or by size— small, 
medium, or large.

Regardless of type or size, 
it is important for applicants 
to be familiar with the mis­

 sion of the foundation. The 
majority of rejections for 

funding by a foundation are a result of the 
applicants’ not understanding the kind of work 
the foundation supports.

N ora Silver, d irec to r o f th e V olunteer 
Project, discussed the many aspects of volun­
teer work. Fifty-four percent of all adults vol­
unteer four hours per week, with m ore people 
volunteering than voting. Volunteer work in­
volves some definite “dos” -and “d o n ’ts.” Vol­
unteers can be involved in fundraising, spe­
cial events, tutoring, visiting the elderly, etc. 
Volunteers should not take jobs from paid 
workers, and they can’t provide the continu­
ity that paid staff provides.

Roberta Steiner, director of the San Fran­
cisco office of the Foundation Center, described 
the center’s work and publications. In addition 
to its specialized publications, which include 
directories, a grants index, guidebooks, and spe­
cialized management books, the center also has 
four main offices and 108 cooperative offices in 
libraries nationwide. These offices offer an ar­
ray of services including fee-based reference 
and consultant services.— Sever Bordeianu, Uni­
versity o f New Mexico, Albuquerque ■