Are Dutch Academic Libraries Keeping up with Research Material? The Coverage of Foreign Academic Publications in Dutch Libraries

Abstract

The National Library of the Netherlands inititated a research project that aimed to assess the coverage of the aggregate collection of Dutch libraries. Their collections of foreign publications of an academic nature in some 20 subjects were compared with the collections of several authoritative German libraries. A sample of recently published monographs and current periodicals in various subjects that were owned by the German library with special collection responsibility in each subject was searched in the shared cataloguing system developed by Pica. On average, the coverage was c.50% for recently published monographs as well as current periodicals. In the second stage, two subject specialists were asked to judge the relevance for academic research in the Netherlands of the missing titles in each subject. After excluding non-relevant titles, the coverage was still rather low, on average 70%. Some disciplines in the humanities score substantially lower. As a solution for shrinking collections, coordinated collection development, international library loan and information technology, important though they are, are inadequate in the short or medium term. To break the current impasse, additional financial measures are imperative