V. 2, SPECIAL SUPPLEMENT of the J,B.C. LIBRARY STAFF NEWSLETTER MARCH 1966 As a matter of interest to our readers, we present this special issue of Biblos, discussing the buying trip to Europe last November of Messrs Basil Stuart-Stubbs and Robert M. Hamilton. Following the return of the voyagers, Biblos asked some Faculty members and the heads of the Library processing divisions for their comments with regard to the results of the trip and the effects it would have on their departments. The following includes an account of the trip written by Mr, Hamilton and the replies received in answer to our questions. THE TRI P B & B have written before for Biblos on the book-buying trip to Europe. Since our return one of us has spoken publicly about the trip several times, to the students of the Library School, to members of the Faculty of Graduate Studies, and most importantly, perhaps, to the librarians on our own staff, Some of the reasons for the trip, an assessment of the experience gained, the probable results have already been presented thereby to a large number of Biblos readers. But there are other members of the staff who have heard little about the trip, and whose interest may well be more casual. The professional staff ha-s already heard as much as they want to hear, the others don't especially want to hear much at all, and so perhaps the best approach is to present some of the superficialities of the trip, some of the simplicities. Other pages in this issue carry weightier information and keener analysis. Preparations for the trip were haphazard and tentative until the last. Pressure of work kept us from organizing as much as we felt we might, or should, but we had reservations about this because we weren't sure what we were planning for. Written accounts of similar trips made by U.S. university libraries were conflicting on many points or shed no significant light on our fuzzy questions. (Should we go to Helsinki to look for Russian books, or had the place really been cleaned out by that man from U.C.L.A.?) Among the haphazard preparations were the discussions with about a dozen members of faculty concerning their main interests in European books, some of them provided "want" lists. We also drew from the files some more or less up-to-date "want" lists covering a variety of subjects. These went into a briefcase which we carried hopefully into every bookstore we visited, Included were treaty series, French poetry, medical periodicals, forestry periodicals, German serials, economic periodicals, Buddhist philosophy, 18th century British history, Commonwealth literature, government publications, Another form of helpful preparation consisted of one of us walking along the shelves in some class areas in our stacks in hopes of storing up an all too evanescent visual record of serials and other titles. 3 Perhaps if our preparations had been based on personal experience we would not have found ourselves in a situation where the only thing to do in order to make two of the "want1;1 lists workable was to put them in alphebetical order. This we accomplished by sitting down on the floor of the hotel room and clipping, with nail scissors, the "want" lists into shreds of spaghetti-1ike paper, each with an author-title entry which could then be rearranged. Our expectations of what we would find were as vague as our preparations. All we were sjre of was that we were going to fly to Amsterdam to start a 3-day book-hunt. The itinerary thereafter included the Hague, Leiden, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Burssels, Paris, Oxford and London. Our length of stay in any one place would be short, from two days as in Brussels (too short) to five days in Paris (too long) or London (too long for one of us, too short for the other). Our flight arrangements and hotel reservations were left open. This meant, theoretically, more freedom from a strict timetable; it made little difference as it happened because we followed our tentative programme strictly - which did mean sometimes scrambling for reservations at the last moment. Our quarries were the bookstores in the cities and we expected to "mine" them as best we could. As soon as we landed in Amsterdam, we scouted the city for bookstores. It was Sunday, but some were open. Our first was Antiqua, a newish place which already had a promising stock of music, mostly biography, criticism, history. We had our first conversation with an owner and started learning fast, at least, one of us did. The next morning we visited other bookstores - Nebrink's, Van Der Peet's, Swets and Zeitlinger's. We asked questions, presented lists of desiderata to those who would accept them, and where- ever we could we pulled books off the shelves. All dealers were happy to quote prices on the books we piled up. So it went day after day. Looking back now, one of us has the composite impression of miles and miles of ill-lighted shelves crammed with dusty books in freezing-cold rooms, miles of day-long trudging of streets looking for the bookstores, or rushing to them by subway. A few of the shops were reasonably wel1-arranged for our kind of foraging; good pockets of the kinds of books we wanted meant that we could "pull" quickly. Where the books were shelved indiscriminately and their shelf-location kept track of on cards, we could not take the time to check from card to book. Seeing the book was everything. But the miles of shelves and the miles of streets did not make for weariness. The stimulus of the constant search was invigorating and occasionally we struck it rich. The composite impression should also include, however, the countless cups of inadequate expresso coffee, the two dozen replenishing and restoring dinners we felt we had nobly earned at the end of the day, together with the dozen varieties of vin rose; and lastly, the twenty-six relaxing, but all-too-short evenings in hotel rooms writing and reporting the day's work back to headquarters (or, at least, writing postcards intended to impress our friends). We took time off for relaxation rarely, and none for sightseeing, Name any of the famous sights of Paris (the Louvre? the Eiffel Tower? Rue Pigalle?) or London (Westminster Abbey? Buckingham Palace? Madame Tussaud's?) or of anywhere else and one or both of us can honestly boast we never saw it, or even had time to think of it. If we saw its exterior it was only because it happened to be in our way. One of us (the one with the sieve-mind) after the visit to the Antlqua store saw immediately that total recall of the trip would be difficult without notes. Which bookstores had been visited, on which day, what had transpired there, and so on, would be impossible to remember without written record. So that particular one of us surreptitiously jotted down the names of the bookstores where transactions of consequence or information of import were gained. This dutiful data processor has counted the number for this article. The total is 51. And this doesn't count the dozens of unimportant ones which took time to locate or explore, before their uselessness was proven. The statistics now derived, the list is of no further use. 5 The good, or better, bookstores remain in one's mind for a variety of reasons - and denote different things. Magis, in Paris, was good, although it was a piled-high junkyard of books, and you washed your hands over a sink that looked like a Huguenot's gravestone chipped half-inch deep to slow the flow of water from an incongrous faucet. Rosenkilde and Bagger, in Copenhagen, was good because it was rich and patrician and had fine, comfortable furnishings and appealed to the book-snob in one of us. Tulkens, in Brussels, was good, although we didn't see a book to touch; files of cards proved it to be one of the largest stocks in Europe, and would be well worth a separate foray some day. We bought many books from those good bookstores which had them for sale. Swets and Zeitlinger's had plenty of medical periodicals, Nijhoff, in the Hague, had just published a new catalogue of French history and we were one of the first to buy from it. They also gave us the proofsheets of a catalogue of linguistics and philology materials and we had a scoop on that. La Porte Etoite, a small out-of-the-way bookstore in Brussels was good because we found much there on French history, music and theatre - the prices were about half what they later proved to be in Paris, We cleaned all the good stuff out of that store. What guided us (apart from the usual supernatural intervention) in our choice of books? Simple - one of us just watched what the other was selecting and chose accordingly. Statistically our performance was phenominally good, as you can see from the figures supplied in this issue, The moral may well be not to underestimate your supernatural auspices. Fortunately, we have not yet heard of any faculty member complaining that the figure looks good only because we chose stuff that shouldn't be in the library anyway! We chose books ranging from a few items, to whole collections, We bought small collections of German philosophy and of Oceanography, and, subsequently, a large collection of medical history. On one occasion we made an offer to buy seven shelves of French drama books as a lot but the proprietor refused to sell because he had taken thirty years to gather them together and couldn't bear to see it all go at once, regardless of the pri ce. & B. THE RESULTS AND THE EFFECTS ACQUISITIONS DIVISION Bibliographic Searching Section The most notable effect of the Stubbs-Hami1 ton European buying trip upon our section was a galvanizing into action of every staff member, After the arrival of a few lists and catalogues to be checked against library holdings, it became obvious that for the next month all of us would have to devote all of our time to this work in order to keep up with the flow from abroad. Time was of the essence, especially in checking whole catalogues "hot off the press" or proof sheets. The telegraph wires and cables hummed with our cryptic messages. An unfortunate side effect of all this activity occasioned by B & B was that we were unable to keep up with the usual catalogue ordering - much to the chagrin of some faculty members, Most were cooperative and sympathetic and we were grateful for their patience. The following table summarizes the results of the trip as seen through our eyes - which are still a little bleary! Holland Belgium France Scand i navi a England 1 terns chec :ked Ordered 2586 2127 500 423 288 137 710 384 70 36 4154 3107 Collections Items checked Ordered Soci ali sm Music & Theatre German 1 i teratu re Philosophy TOTALS 7 1 terns chec ked 350 83 200 500 1133 5287 As the above figures show, the library lacked and therefore ordered approximately 75% of the titles checked - a fairly good "batting average". Dorothy Shields ACQUISITIONS DIVISION Ordering Section The effects of B & B's buying trip to Europe has been felt by the Ordering Section in two separate waves (tidal waves!) First, last fall, the typists were swamped with rush orders-., and confirming orders so that regular batches were, by force, set aside for almost a month. Some orders were placed by letter and telegram after being searched.but before being verified by the searchers and they were given to the typists for the order cards to be typed. The last of these, a catalogue of 850 items, was given to the Ordering Section in January. If the order typists felt as if they had been hit by an avalanche of orders, the receiving people were later to feel that they had been hit by a whole mountain. The smaller shipments which came by mail began arriving in December and were handled along with other shipments without special procedure, the only difference being a greater volume of work - making us very thankful for the extra staff granted us in December. The larger shipments came later, We did not hear of them until mid-January when suddenly our clerk in charge of Customs clearances went frantic trying to match cryptic notices from the National Harbours Board, bearing only the name of the ship and port of departure, with invoices and M.A. forms bearing the name of the vendor, but not of the ship. This is not difficult when only one shipment is expected but when several arrive at once, and two or three are exactly the same number of crates, it becomes quite a puzzle. (Moreover, Customs officials frown upon identification by coin-flipping.) The next stage was receipt of the shipnents, and who does not remember easing themselves through the narrow passageway between wooden crates piled high in the Receiving Room? The prospect of another shipment filling that last meagre space forced us into a wild game of musical shelves. We managed to procure storage space in order to clear shelves for the Canner shipment which, when moved, left space for books from the Nijhoff shipment, which when unpacked left floor space in the Receiving Room for the next load:-:: The Nijhoff shipment, consisting of over 30 crates, has proven to be the largest and most difficult to handle. Since serials and monographs were not shipped separately, they must now be sorted out so that the periodicals can be routed through Serials Division. Staff from Serials Division is giving us much appreciated help with this task, enabling us to expend more of our energies elsewhere. This is more of a job than the number of orders placed would indicate, since there are many sets, some being 100 and 150 volumes per title. One title consists of 1,172 volumes bound into 646. Sometimes, the notation on an invoice 100 volumes means 150 parts bound into 100 volumes and other times it means 100 parts bound into 75 volumes. Sometimes it means 80 volumes of the title describee on the card and 20 volumes of a related but blbliographically separate title described in tiny print in the catalogue (said fine print having been missed in typing the cards). Because order cards were typed after the order was sent by cable, there is no vendor's copy of the order form in each book to identify it and since most of the material is in foreign languages, the task of finding the order for each is not always easy, although there are many cases where it is routine. This is complicated by the fact that there are no orders at all typed for some of the books, i.e. one item in the catalogue turned out to be a collection of 158 books, (necessitating searching, checking, verifying and typing cards before the books can be processed). If such collections had been any larger they would have seriously impaired the typists' ability to produce new orders, We are processing the Nijhoff shipment at a fairly steady rate, being able to load book trucks only as empty ones come back from Cataloguing. There appears to be one more shipment of 11 cases still to come and if we are lucky we might have enough shelves cleared for it not more than a week or two after it arrives. If we are really lucky we might clear up everything by the time Hans Burndorfer goes to Germany to buy more books. (Dear Hans, please remember your friends back home!) Rita Butterfield CATALOGUING DIVISION It is clear that the European buying trip will result in a sharply increased volume of work for the Cataloguing Division, As the books reach us, we will search the Library of Congress catalogue and order printed cards wherever possible. Books with cards should be processed and added to the collection during the spring of 1966. However, since most of the items will be out of print books published in Europe, we suspect that only a relatively small proportion of them will be covered by LC cards. Those that require original cataloguing will be 10 divided into two groups. The more valuable acquisitions will be catalogued first. The rest will be added to the existing backlog. In due course each of the letter group will be represented by an entry in both the card catalogue and the supplement to the backlog list, Requests for specific books will be dealt with immediately; the remainder will probably not be catalogued until some time in 1967, unless we are very, very lucky, and nobody else goes on buying trips, and we get lots of super-efficient additional staff. Gerry Dobbin BIBLIOGRAPHY DIVISION The trip gave the Library first-hand acquaintance with a number of European dealers, and a general impression of the market there. At some future date a junior member of the staff will go well "tipped-off". Dealers in question have an open door to U.B.C; for myself, I am able to deal with these Scandinavians in a more "en pantoufles" manner. I wish the trip had been to Africa, wh'ch would have given the travellers some holiday-time and tan, and would have brought the library material in English and French. Things like "Historisk Tidskrift" (Stockholm),"Historisk Tidsskrift" (Copenhagen) and "Historik Tidsskrift" (Oslo); "Norges" this, "Nordisk" that, and "Norsk" the other, crisscrossed between the three countries, almost throw me berserk. R. J. Lanning DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY - Dr. Christopher W. Stocker The recent European expedition of Mr. Stuart-Stubbs and Mr. Hamilton proved very useful in the field of European history, particularly in French history and the history of the Low Countries, The purchase of material in French history from M. Nijhoff -- negotiated as a direct result of this expedition -- was an event of major importance in the development of faci 1 i t ies for graduate study in Early Modern France, my own field of special interest, I feel that there is a very definite value in this technique of book buying in European history. 11 The principal task in developing our holdings is to secure the old standard material (both monographs and published sources and source collections, especially) now out of print, much of it (in my own field) long out of print. Heretofore we have had to rely on the catalogues issued by the major second hand dealers of Europe, In the time that these catalogues are printed up, shipped, checked out by us for materials, and the resulting orders placed, much has already been lost to other buyers. In their recent expedition Mr. Stuart-Stubbs and Mr, Hamilton happened, partly through good fortune, to reach a number of dealers who were just about to, or who had just circulated new catalogues and by air-mailing them and arranging to hold material pending confirmation, the library was able to improve substantially its "percentages" on catalogue items, I am fairly certain that this method will inevitably yield results far more satisfactory than the old catalogue orders and so I would support, the idea of more such tours in the future (while not, of course, ceasing catalogue ordering), In addition, it may well be that the personal contact and volume of business so transacted, will result in some kind of especially favorable treatment or services from some of the establishments vi s ited. The very success of the expedition created one very serious problem that has disturbed the entire history department and that is that the processing of all the orders resulting from the visit has called a halt to normal catalogue ordering. It is doubtless true that a greater amount of more valuable material was secured as a result of the expedition, than would have been secured from the result of neglected "at-home" catalogues, However, it remains unfortunate that this price had to be paid. This is especially so since only a few areas of European history benefitted from the expedition, while the cessation of catalogue ordering affected every field of history, I would wholeheartedly support whatever needs to be done to speed and increase the processing of orders from catalogues and expeditions and the speed of cataloguing and making available materials thus secured. 12 DEPARTMENT OF SLAVONICS - Dr. S. Z. Pech The buying trip of Mr. Stuart-Stubbs and Mr. Hamilton to Europe has at last placed the UBC Library in the big leagues from the point of view of methods employed in acquiring books. Harvard and several other large U.S. libraries have followed this practice for many years, and this accounts in no small measure, for their impressive holdings in many fields. Although the two gentlemen limited their European visit to the Western parts of Europe, they were responsible for the Library acquiring important and rare materials relating to both Western and Eastern Europe, materials which would otherwise have slipped through our hands and fallen into the laps of other insti tut ions. I, for one, was presented, for the first time in ten years, with a large catalogue and told to choose everything of significance in it. This happened without any advance warning and it is only a small exaggeration to say that this novel munificence unnerved me. I don't think the Library should do this to a man whom it has taught the virtue of parsimony for years; I had to go through the catalogue actually three times (this is not an exaggeration) before gathering enough courage to order everything that seemed of significance. There is no way to organize book purchases on a scale now envisioned by the Library save by being on the spot, gaining the confidence of the dealers, and cajoling them into giving us access to out-of-print stock before catalogues are prepared. These are hard facts of competition which cannot be ignored. May I enter one or two recommendations. It is to be hoped that both Germany and Eastern Europe will be covered by a similar enterprise in the near future, in order to reinforce our already respectable collection of books from this part of the world, A colleague of mine, now in Eastern Europe on a sabbatical, is looking only incidentally for books, and has just been able to obtain a large collection of out-of- print scholarly books for an average of only $1,50 a volume. The difference between the amount the _ibrary will pay for this collection and the amount it would have to pay for it through regular channels would defray the cost of one return 13 fare by air between Vancouver and Paris. Also, is it asking too much that Asia be placed on the list? And how about occasional shorter trips closer to home, notably to Kraus and Johnson in New York, with their largest stocks of periodicals sets in the world? One reason why the Harvard Library has the most impressive collection in many fields is attributable to the ability of its directing staff to anticipate avenues of scholarly endeavour not just for tomorrow or next year, but for twenty years from now. Our own library is seeking to determine future trends to guide its purchases and here are a few suggestions for the field of history. The next few years will see expanding studies of economic and social history (at least with regard to Continental Europe), There will be growing use of continental European daily newspapers (nineteenth century) of which virtually no North American library has any substantial holdings or back files, not excluding Harvard. In this connection, it may be remarked that our Library prudently decided to acquire runs of newspapers in the future only on microfilm; however, could this rule be relaxed for some parts of Europe? Unless this is done, there is no chBnce of building up any holdings for some countries since many of their newspapers have little chance of being reproduced in micro-form for commercial distribution, for the pre-1945 period. Another future trend will be the history of science and the UBC Library is already making great strides in this direction. Further it would be desirable to collect manuscript material for certain selected fields, in addition to what is already being done by Special Collections. One last note. I hope the Library will be able to expand its staff lest shortage of personnel should inhibit the acquisition and processing of books which the increased budget allows, DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY - Dr. J. F. Bosher I wish to say first of all that there can be few faculty members whose fields of work have been better served than mine by the overseas trip of Mr, Stuart-Stubbs and Mr, Hamilton, 14 The collection of French historical books which they bought from Nijhoff in Holland is extremely valuable for our graduate work in European History. Many of the items in the col lection were already sold by the time our order arrived, but had our Librarians not been in Holland when they were, we should have lost a lot more. Their trip was therefore of direct benefit to the History Department. Useful collections of historical material are becoming rarer and more and more have to be sought out. This can best be done directly by someone travelling to the book dealers. It is my impression from visiting French book dealers over several years that there is not much relation between their catalogues and their collections. Furthermore, they don't really like to sell their books and seem to prefer to think of their business as finding a good home for their books rather than selling them. In short, someone on the spot can usually do better than someone writing at long-range. Certain American universities have known this for many years. From talking with your travelling librarians after their trip, I have the impression that with patience and a little more travelling, we could find important collections in the minor capitals of Europe such as Brussels, Stockholm and Munich as well as in the more obvious centres, DEPARTMENT OF CLASSICS, DIVISION OF LINGUISTICS - Dr, R. W. Gregg I should like to say that Mr. Stubbs' and Mr. Hamiltons' overseas trip provided a wonderful opportunity for buying books on linguistics that otherwise we would have missed. They were able to have their pick of the linguistics items in an unpublished catalogue in Holland and I understand that all the items we requested were made available to us. In particular this gave us a chance to build up our linguistic atlases which is one of our important projects right now. 15 PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT - Dr. Peter Remnant The only books acquired during the expedition which are of direct interest to the Philosophy Department comprise a lot of about five hundred, purchased in Sweden, There are among these a number of worthwhile items, but unfortunately there are also many books of little interest and many which duplicate items in our present holdings. My impression is that we have paid a high price for those books in the lot which are worth having, I had provided the Librarian with a list of desiderata before his departure, but I gather that he was unable to find any of these items, I do not wish to suggest that I do not think the trip was of value, even in the area of my own interests; however, I think that its utility consisted for the most part in the contacts which were made with European bookdealers, and that the real benefits of the trip are to be hoped for in the future. In connection with this I think that our best means of building up the collectior lies in selective ordering from the second-hand lists and in the fastest possible processing of these orders, It would also be useful if faculty or members of the library staff who were going to be in Europe and other distant parts couIc be encouraged to do a bit of scouting in their spare time, It might also be useful to send out more want lists and to cultivate the services of local book scouts in various regions, We hope that this special issue of Biblos has filled in a few gaps, raised a few questions, and supported the general feeling that book-buying trips of this magnitude are of great value to the University as a research community and to the Library as a depository for the accumulated thought and knowledge of civilizations.
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Biblos 1966-03
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Title | Biblos |
Alternate Title | UBC Library Staff Newsletter |
Publisher | Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library |
Date Issued | 1966-03 |
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University of British Columbia. Library |
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Language | English |
Identifier | Z671 .B5 Z671_B5_1966_02_06_special |
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Date Available | 2015-07-13 |
Provider | Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library |
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CatalogueRecord | http://resolve.library.ubc.ca/cgi-bin/catsearch?bid=1216361 |
DOI | 10.14288/1.0190773 |
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