College and Research Libraries By THOMAS R. CASSIDY United Nations Documents in the Medium, Sized University- Nuisance or Necessity? Mr. Cassidy is reference librarian, Uni- versity of Oregon. T HE WORLD, as it grows older, is be-coming ever more garrulous. By the middle of 1947, only two years after it had come into existence, the United Nations had spoken-and printed-more words than its predecessor, the League of Nations, produced in a quarter of a century. Today, the General Assembly by itself is responsi- ble for some 1800 documents, ranging from one page to several thousands of .pages. The Security council has issued about 2000, the Economic and Social · Council I goo more. Minor divisions of the larger agen- · cies-commi ttees, subcommittees, drafting subcommittees, commissions and conferences, permanent and temporary-have yet other thousands to their credit, in some instances nearly as many as the parent body. Much of this mass of wordage is given over to matters in which few people are in- terested, to questions of parliamentary pro- cedure, to the endless, confused maneuvers of international politics, to the clumsy legis- lative machinery of fifty-nine nations with fifty-nine separate sets of interests and nearly as many languages in which to voice them. Indeed, most United Nations docu- ments have the single purpose of straighten- ing out some aspect of this confusion. Of this genre are such titles as, "Procedure for handling items .proposed for insertion in the provisional agenda of the Council by APRIL, 1952 Specialized Agencies and non-governmental organizations," "Memorandum, draft reso- lutions, draft protocols and annex on trans- fer to the United Nations of functions and powers exercised by the League of Nations under the Conventions on the traffic in women and children, and in obscene pub- lications," "Summary report of financial implications of resolutions involving ex- penditures from United Nations funds." These documents make up a detailed record of the United Nations at work and in this respe~t they are valuable, but their applica- tiod~i~ Jimi ted and their use confined to ··I~ the specialized worker following a single line of research. There are, however, scattered among these publications of limited value, a great .many reports and studies of economic and social matters which are international in scope, timely and of which fairly constant use can be made. Among these, to give only a few random samples, · are studies of housing, of communications, of compara- tive marriage laws, of drug consumption, of the development of backward countries, of foreign exchange, of international law. Within this material-and in many libraries only within this material-may be found such varied information as the extent of postwar railroad construction in South Africa, the current production of iron ore in Mexico, the death rate in India, or the main causes of discrimination. All universities have some coyrses in eco- 107 nomics, geography, history, political science, sociology and law; and in all these fields United Nations publications provide ex- cellent source material. But not all uni- versities will be able to make . the same amount of use of this material. A large university with a great many students and a correspondingly well-rounded faculty nat- urally lends itself to a greater degree of specialization than a small or medium-sized university. Where in a large university there may be, as there is at New York U ni- versity, a whole group of courses built around the study of the United Nations, a smaller institution will usually have to con- fine itself to a single class on international organization. This, of course, affects the library. The library of a large university can much more easily provide the money, space and person- nel for processing, storing and making available all the thousands of United N a- tions documents. Probably such a library will even be one of the thirty-two United Nations depositories, receiving at no charge all but restricted documents. On the other hand, the smaller university library, even if it were able to bind, shelve and index the complete body of United Nations publica- tions, would find that demand was not great enough to justify the required expense of money and space. The problem is, therefore, that while the medium-sized university urgently needs much of the material published by the United Nations, this material is too bulky and requires too much handling to warrant its complete acquisition. The solution, of course, is a policy of limited acquisition, a policy which is at once favored and made tantalizingly difficult by United Nations publication practices. This is true because United Nations pub- lications (excluding periodicals) are issued in three different formats-mimeographed documents, the Official Records~ and the publications of the Secretariat. Each of these divisions duplicates a large amount of the material in the two others, and each contains much that appears in no other place. The mimeographed documents are the most inclusive, containing all published ma- terial except the most lengthy and impor- tant studies and reports. Since they are is- sued when needed by the various organs, they are also the most up to date. How- ever, because of their number, because each document appears separately and because they make use of a poor quality of paper, they are also the most fragile and the most generally difficult and expeDsive to handle. They must be sorted and arranged accord- ing to a fairly complex and not always con- sistent system of symbols, they must be ·bound and some method of indexing them must be found. Finally, they require the greatest amount of space and contain the largest number of non-utilizable documents. If they are not to be tied up and put away in some basement stack to rot or allowed to become mixed-up piles of dog-eared papers, they will require the "full time services of at least one trained librarian and several assistants-more than the medium-sized li- brary can allot to such a job. The Official Records are the printed ac- counts, either verbatim or summary, of the meetings of the chief deliberative bodies which make up the United Nations and of certain of their permanent and ad hoc com- mittees. These are issued in five sets-for the General Assembly, the Security Coun- cil, the Economic and Social Council, the Trusteeship Council and the Atomic En- ergy Commission. (Publications of the International Court of Justice are not a part of the 0 fficial Records and, being few in number and of a specialized, legal na- ture, need not be taken up here.) In addi- 108 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES tion, many of the more important mimeo- graphed documents are reprinted in the 0 fficial Records.) usually as supplements or annexes, occasionally as a part of the records of the meetings. In format the 0 fficial Records are much more permanent than the mimeographed documents, less space is required for their shelving, and their arrangement is simple. A little later we can consider a few of the difficulties they present. / The surveys, reports · and bibliographies / prepared by the Secretariat are the most useful of all United Nations publications for general reference work in questions in- volving either United Nations activities or world social and economic conditions. Since these are issued in book or pamphlet form and with a ready-lpade subject classi- ficatipn which divides them into fifteen broad categories, and since they are com- paratively few in number, they offer no special problems. Acquisition of the two latter types of United Nations publications will probably be as much as the library of the medium- sized university can manage. As far a~ space and expense are concerned, this is a good compromise, but as a complete solu- tion it has several major weaknesses. For one thing, the 0 fficial Records contain many of the important documents, but they do not contain all of them. Again, the Economic and Social Council's resolution to send a group of experts to South America for a study of the effects of chewing coca leaves may, for instance, be reprinted in three different parts of the 0 fficial Records, while a much more frequently cited analy- sis of comparative methods of compiling been printed because of lack of funds and time. Someday, of course, these will be available, but that is no help when a docu- ment they are going to contain is needed now. But perhaps the greatest disadvantage of using the Official Records as a substitute for a set of mimeographed documents is the difficulty of locating a document which has been reprinted there. Nearly all citations to United Nations publications are made to mimeographed documents: except for the Secretariat publications and those of the committee reports w~ich appear in indi- vidual Official Records supplements, refer- ences are usually made only to document symbols. Thus, for instance, "Establish- ment of relationship between the United Nations and the Universal Postal Union" may be cited in Publications of Interna- tional Organizations simply as E / 278, with no indication that it has been reprinted in an annex to the records of the Economic and Social Council. And, since the Of- ficial Records do not reproduce documents in accordance with the numerical order of the symbols, if E / 278 is wanted, all one can do is to hunt for it, more or less blindly and with no certainty that it has ever been reprinted. There have been published, it is true, a few check lists which aid in this search, but they are far from complete and are particularly weak on documents issued by committees, commissions and other minor bodies. For the past several sessions, however, the task of digging material out of the 0 fficial Rec.ords has been growing less diffi- cult. The General ASsembly, for example, now begins its annexes with location lists vital statistics, since it was considered by a of its documents and those of its commit- commission rather than the whole Council, tees. Somewhat similar lists are also being never goes beyond the mimeographed stage. put out by the Economic and Social Coun- There are also parts of the 0 fficial Records cil and the Trusteeship Council. The -a great many of them-which have not / Ul]ited Nations Documents Index, pub- APRIL, 1952 109 lished since January of 1950, also has a section devoted to republications. These and other improvements are still no substi- tute for the knowledge gained by experience in using the 0 fficial Records, nor will they be of much value without such experience. Nevertheless, they are indicative of the United Nations' willingness to disseminate knowledge of its work as broadly as possi- ble. They help to make it possible for United Nations documentation, in spite of its bulk and complexity, to be fitted into a medium-sized · library without demanding a disproportionate slice of budget and stacks. And even a limited collection of · these documents, aided when necessary by interlibrary loan from one of the depository libraries, can be an extremely valuable pos- session at a time when world wide under- standing and knowledge are needed more than they have ever been before. Union Library Catalogue: Services, 1950. Quo Vadis? (Continued from page 106) the additional task of supplying these mis- cellaneous services to the public and in- dustry at large? We doubt it. We feel that the very growth of these services within the four regions justifies their con- tinuance and emphasizes the importance of their consideration in whatever local, regional or other library planning is under- taken. In conclusion, this study points to a definite need for more careful attention to the potentials and values of the regional centers to the public, college, research and . industrial libraries within the area by the. libraries themselves. The centers have told , and retold their story; they have performed their services in peace and in war, in depres- sion an'd · in inflation. They have set the pace in almost every instance. Are libraries leading the way to better centers, or are they accepting this manna as something quite within the ordinary? How do new staff members come to know and use the bibliographical centers? Do they visit the center, learn from a librarian who under- stands and uses the center frequently, or are they merely told to "call this number if you don't know the answer." It is imperative that a concrete program . of better, even if somewhat fewer, services to a larger number of institutions and individuals be resolved. Greater coopera- tion among librarians and business men in_ the activities of the regional centers should result in progress in solving the current financial needs. Where industry learns that bibliographical services pay in business profits, their financial support is forth- coming. If interlibrary loan is the primary need, such services should be implemented and expedited. If industry has immediate need for technical materials, cooperation should be fostered to produce them promptly. If the National Union Catalog is to be expanded, ·what other libraries should be included? These are but a few of the problems to be considered, and they vary from center to center. There ·is a definite need for more community partici- pation in the planning, or mediocrity will certainly result. N O'Y_, is the time for con- certed action. 110 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES