LITERATURE

Saul Herner (left) and Dewitt Ο Myatt of Atlantic Research confer on interview results

Building α Functional Library Atlantic Research starts f rom scratch to build a

l ibrary keyed to specific functional needs of its staff

J UST as a community center aims to please its particular community, a

research hbrary should please and serve the needs of the scientists and tech­nologists who use it. This was the basis on which Dewit t 0 . Myatt and Saul Herner approached the problem of developing their company Hbrary at Atlantic Research Corp . of Alexandria, Va.

Herner, who is a biochemist with a library science degree, got the idea for a new approach t o building a re­search hbrary while employed as librar­ian at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. The idea was to modif> general hbrary techniques in terms of specific situations at a given organiza­tion. Atlantic Researcli was an ideal company to try out t h e new idea be­cause its research is specialized, de­voted primarily to l iquid and solid fuels for jet propulsion and rocketry, and its contract research activities place a premium on the rapid collection of the information needed.

Atlantic Research already had a library when Herner was employed to head it, but Myatt, w h o is manager of development at the company and who has the library under his supervision, backed Herner's new approach 100%. Myatt, former managing editor of In dustrial i? Engineering, Chemistry, has long had an interest in technical com-, munication techniques.

The staff at Atlantic Research* is small, about 140 persans. 60 of wtiom

aie professional scientists and engi­neers. Consequently, Herner decided to interview each member of t h e tech­nical staff personally regarding his needs and desires for a workable re­search hbrary. He asked the staff to answer the questions put to them in terms of their own experiences over the immediate past year.

A vote on 16 different types of pub­lications showed that handbooks were most frequently used. Herner found that the staff consulted 107 periodicals, all of them in English—they scarcely ever used foreign literature. Only in rare instances had anyone made signifi­cant use of periodicals over 10 years old.

Of the 107 periodicals consulted, 42 were trade journals, 42 were research

15 Most Used Periodical Publications at Atlantic Research Corp.

(In Rank Order) SPIA Abstracts (classified) Chemical and Engineering Netoa Chemical Abstracts Industrial 6- Engineering Chemistry Modern Plastics Jet Propulsion Chemical Engineering Chemical Engineering Progrès* Chemical Week journal of Chemical Physics Journal of the American Chemical Society Physics Today Plastics World ASTIA Title Announcement Bulletin Journal of Polymer Science

journals, 15 weore indexing and ab­stracting publica-uons, and eight were review publications. T h e most used periodical was S 1*1Ά Abstracts (classi­fied), which is published by the Solid Propellant Infornnation Agency of the Navy's Bureau o i Ordnance.

While the development of solid pro-pellants is primarily a problem in chem­istry and chemical engineering, most of the information on cmrent and past developments in the field exists in the form of security classified reports, 'which do not appear in the conventional abstracting publications.

Substantial use is made of basic chemical information in the solid pro­pellant field, however, and this use re­flects in the fact that Chemical Ab­stracts placed thi:rd. C&EN placed sec­ond because the staff use it extensively to keep abreast o>f the whole gamut of developments in. the chemical and chemical processing fields.

Use Made of AAajor Types of Pub­lications at Atlantic Research Corp.

(In Rank Order ) % of

Population Type of Publication Handbooks Unpublished Research Reports Manufacturers* Literature Advanced Textboolcs and Mono­

graphs Elementary Textbooks Technical News or House or

Trade Publications Dictionaries Indexing and Abstracting Pub­

lications Research Journals Mathematical and Physical

Tables Standards, Specifications, and

Test Codes Reprints Patents Review Publications Encyclopedias Theses

Using 9 6 85 85

85 83

79 76

6 9 6 7

6 3

5 8 54 3 5 2 5 2 3 10

The staff interview revealed that "asking somebody" is one of the most important bibliographic tools. This is followed by lookbng u p references cited in magazine articdes and consulting in­dexes, and abstracts.

Library card catalogs don't play much of a part at Atlantic Research. Only 12 persons out of the 60 inter­viewed had u sed catalogs in the pre­vious year, and they used them merely as a means of locating specific titles that they already knew.

The most important reference serv­ices turned out to "be accession and selected reading lists. All but 13 of the persons interviewed had made use of such lists in the year immediately preceding the surrvey.

Literature searches ranked high, 43

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^ C H * » t r ^ l ~~ ^ * * ί . re***:** ? v ^

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LITERATURE.

out of the 60 persons interviewed had either had searches done for them or stated that they would use such a serv­ice if it were available.

Need for guidance services in finding sources of information was practically nil. Less than half of the persons in­terviewed had made any use of such services for a year or more.

On the basis of interview results, an open shelf library arrangement was adopted. The library will have an au­thor catalog for books and a source catalog for reports. These will serve as shelf lists for inventory purposes as well as finding lists.

Publications in the collection will be acquired in the proportions suggested for each of the fields of interest to At­lantic Research. Aside from the per­iodicals and reports it receives auto­matically, Atlantic Research is going to build its collection by asking for recommendations from its technical staff. The collection will be supple­mented by pertinent bibliographies, in­dexes, and book reviews.

Since usefulness of its periodicals wanes after five years and disappears after 10, Atlantic Research is not going to keep any back issues over 10 years, except indexing and abstracting pub­lications. These will be kept for 20 years just for safety's sake. Trade journals will be held for five years only.

The librarian will perform literature searches, select useful publications for acquisition, and issue accession lists. He will also comb the 107 journals re­ceived and pick out pertinent articles for inclusion in the selected reading list for circulation to the staff. He will be available to guide personnel in the use of worthwhile sources, but he doubts that this will be much of a need. Translations that are requested will be farmed out. The occasional need for older periodicals will be satisfied by interlibrary loans from several large libraries in nearby Washington.

There is no room for stagnation in Atlantic Research's library. Myatt and Herner say that the information on which the library is based now may be quite different in a few years. They intend to repeat the interviewing peri­odically. When the answers show different needs, the library will be rearranged to suit.

Interviews were also an educational tool for both personnel and manage­ment. W h e n ι man is asked if he uses certain devices to obtain information, he may try them out and adopt cer­tain of those that he does not use as result of the discussion. In addition, through the use of selected reading and accession lists, the scientist is con­sciously introduced to tools that he might otherwise not use.

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