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Show , ) 5?' ^j^o UNIVERSITY OF UTAH LIBRARY BULLETIN Vol. I, No, 2 December 1, 1967 News Notes The University of Utah Joins the Center for Research Librarles In January, 1968, the Board of Directors of the Center for Research Libraries will accept the University of Utah as a corporate member. This action will have far reaching consequences for University of Utah research and in effect extends the holdings avail-able to our scholars by two-and-one-half million volumes. The Center for Research Libraries is a research library's library, It was es-tablished in 1949 (known then as the Midwest Inter-Library Center) in Chicago to serve the big ten midwest universities. Its original reason for being was to organize, house, service and purchase infrequently used research materials, Over the years, there has evolved an acquisition policy to collect materials to support a forward looking research program for its member libraries, The scope of its service has expanded from the original big ten to thirty members, from Harvard in the east to U.C.L.A. in the west and some Canadian libraries. Their service to academic research has evolved from regional in 1949, then national and now to an international scope. Our membership will exert considerable influence on our acquisition policies, Now, it will be unnecessary for us to duplicate anything found in the Center's two-and-one-half million volumes of valuable but infrequently used research materials, We will consequently spend our limited resources on research materials not held by the Center. Our collection building efforts as a result of our membership will be modified in many other ways e.g,, the Down's survey of the University of Utah Libraries recommended we reclassify our large broken files of U. S. State Documents. This would require a vast amount of time and expense which now becomes unnecessary because the Center holds all official publications of all fifty states from 1952 forward and also several hundred thousand volumes of state documents older than 1952, deposited by the member libraries, We may, if we choose, simply deposit our state documents with the Center, They will retain any which will fill gaps in their files. We then will always have most state documents available to us by means of interlibrary loan from the Center obtained when necessary by collect telephone cali. Robert Vosper, U.C.L.A. Librarian, said on the occasion of their admission to membership in July of this year that "...the power of the center lies in its capacity to project supplementary levéis of library resource development beyond the individual capacities of the member institutions.,.The intent is not to reduce the local library effort or to produce simple fiscal economies, but rather to serve scholarship, through cooperative effort, better than the members can separately." The kinds of things now available to us through our membership should be of extreme interest to our faculty. A few examples are as follows: Current Scientific Journals. There are about 3,600 scientific journals abstracted in Chemical Abstracts and in Biological Abstracts that are not commonly available in other U. S. libraries. (A recent check indicated that forty per cent of these were not known to be in any other library in the United States and eighty per cent were known to be held in no more than two other libraries,) |