The University of California Libraries: A Plan for Development (1977)

42 The University of California Libraries
The attempt to catalog and process the flood of books has likewise
become an increasingly difficult task. As De Gennaro points out,
the problems may originate in acquisition policies, but they "are only
exacerbated by costly traditional processing routines." 13 For each
locally-held book, not only must expensive bibliographic searching and
cataloging take place, but the catalog cards produced must be filed
and the ever-growing catalog must itself be maintained. The extent of
this problem is illustrated by the fact that, despite often herculean
efforts, there are backlogs of uncataloged books numbering in the
hundreds of thousands within the UC system.
Yet even if there were sufficient money available to pursue the
traditional "acquisitions approach"--to buy ever increasing numbers
of volumes, to catalog them fully, and then to house them--there is
growing evidence that the approach itself does a poor job of meeting
users' real needs. "As with cooking," comments Buckland, "expenditure
on ingredients does not guarantee the quality of the
product." 14
There are several reasons why the approach fails. In the first
place as the number of volumes held increases and the size of the
collection grows, it becomes more and more difficult to use. "The
library goal of comprehensive collecting |and| the social impulse
permanently to record events in detail," Rosenthal points out, "have
added not only to the bulk of the record, but have reduced to very
low levels the rate of use for any given item in many subject categories.
More and more of what is collected is actually used less
and less." 15
13 DeGennaro, p. 918.
14 Michael K. Buckland, Book Availability and the Library User,
Pergamon Press, 1975, pp. 39-40.
15 Joseph A. Rosenthal The Research Libraries Group, 1973, p. 16.