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Preface The Collection Development Policy of the National Agricultural Library is intended to guide recommending officers, selectors and other staff in developing a cohesive collection. It also serves to inform NAL users, the agricultural community, and the public concerning the interests and pursuits of the Library. The National Agricultural Library's basic collection development policy uses the Library of Congress subject classification schedules and the Research Library Group's Conspectus terms to describe the depth and breadth of the Library's acquisitions. The Library's collection development policy is augmented by three cooperative collection development policies. These three joint policies all cover subjects in which the other national libraries (the National Library of Medicine and the Library of Congress) have an interest. The policies are statements of the differences and similarities in the collecting activities of the Libraries. The subjects of the policies and the libraries that cooperate in each are listed below.
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Mission of NAL The National Agricultural Library (NAL) was established to fulfill the mission given to the U.S. Department of Agriculture "to acquire and to diffuse among the people of the United States useful information on subjects connected with agriculture and rural development, in the most general and comprehensive sense of those terms.(1) and the duty "to acquire and preserve...all information concerning agriculture and rural development...(2) | |||||||||||||
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Purpose of Policy This collection development policy is intended to provide statements reflecting current information needs of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and of the agricultural community, both national and worldwide. It is intended to guide selectors in choosing material for the collection; to assist managers in planning and reviewing development of the collection; to inform NAL and Department staff, users, and other interested persons or institutions of the nature o f the collection and the direction of its development. The policy statements are intended to define the scope of collection and to specify the degree of coverage for each area defined as being within scope. | |||||||||||||
Coordination The NAL collection policy takes into account the Library of Congress (LC), the National Library of Medicine (NLM), and other libraries as sources of books, journals, or other material in their prime collecting a reas. Some subjects, however, are prime collecting areas for several libraries, as veterinary medicine for both NAL and NLM and nontechnical agriculture for both NAL and LC. Also, the requirements of Department staff often extend beyond the prime areas of agriculture into subjects covered by other collections necessitating acquisition in those subjects. The goal of the Library is to satisfy the needs of its users in the most effective method. Often needs of users in such an area as medicine (of interest t o veterinary science or rural sociology) cannot satisfactorily be met by interlibrary loan or copying arrangements due to copyright or restrictions of the other libraries, but require some collecting in the subject to provide reasonable document delivery services. Thus, overlap with other collections may occur in providing the most effective and economical use of available information resources. In some cases, availability of materials elsewhere on a timely basis may reduce the need to acquire them for the collection. For instance, doctoral dissertations are usually available from a commercial firm on demand. Rather than acquiring them routinely for the collection, current practice is to order them only when requested by users. In other case s large sets of reports, such as the documents of the United Nations, are available on microform. Acquisition of the whole set on microform reduces the need to acquire hard copy. Acquisition of large sets in microform is encouraged when the need to cata log many peripheral items is reduced by the availability of printed indexes for the sets, such as UNDEX: United Nations Documents Index, through which U.N. documents can be accessed. | |||||||||||||
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Currency The interests of the Department are subject to change, which must be reflected in the collection policy. The policy is not intended to be an unchanging law, but must adapt to the needs of the Library's clientele. Library staff involved in collection development must remain cognizant of the activities of the Department, reflecting them appropriately in collection development policy(3). The ability of the Library to provide complete coverage in all areas may be limited by budgetary or staff considerations. | |||||||||||||
Consistency Adjusting to changing needs does not mean that the collection development policy should become so fluid that no continuity is maintained. A study of the history of collection development at NAL shows remarkable consistency. The core agricultural subjects and the support subjects, such as chemistry, economics, statistics, have been areas of concentration from the beginning of the Library. The seemingly opposite poles of consistency and change both apply to collection development at NAL. | |||||||||||||
Core Subjects NAL specializes in information on agriculture and related subjects as indicated below. The core subjects of the collection in which the Library has consistently made strenuous efforts to collect comprehensively are summarized as follows:
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Related Subjects To support the research and program needs of the Department, the Library collects substantial materials in subjects such as chemistry, physics, biology, medicine, pharmacology, immunology, reproduction, natural history, wildlife, ecology and pollution, genetics, natural resources, meteorology, fisheries, and economics. The Library also collects selectively books and journals in such subjects as management science and computer technology to assist Department staff. The annual review of the NAL file on borrowed copyrighted material suggests many of the titles and subjects that need additional coverage in order to meet the needs of the Department. Titles may be collected at various levels for a year or two or for many years depending on the need. | |||||||||||||
Types of Material The Library collects substantive information in assorted formats for the advancement of agriculture in the United States. Increasing use of various media for communicating important agricultural information necessitates that NAL acquire and make these forms available to the agricultural community to insure the successful accomplishment of its mission. Audiovisuals. Bibliographic variants. Dissertations. Environmental Impact Statements. Government Documents. Juvenile materials. Legal materials. Machine-Readable Materials. Manuscripts. Maps. Microforms. Newsletters. Newspapers. Patents. Portraits. Printouts from computerized data bases. Rare books. Reprints. Translations. Exclusions.
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Format of Scope Statement The basic statement of the collection policy is expressed in terms of subject fields as given in the Library of Congress classification schedules and is arranged by the classification numbers from the schedules. For each subject a code is given to indicate the level of collecting intensity, e.g.: | |||||||||||||
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The five levels of collecting intensity are:
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Footnotes: |
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