scientific conference P apers and

1. P roceedings contents, injuence, value, availability

SCIENT IF IC C O N F E R E N C E PAPERS A N D P R O C E E D I N G S

SCIENTIFIC CONFERENCE PAPERS

AND PROCEEDINGS

Contents, injuence, value, availability

br The International Federation for Documentation .

Reprinted from Unesco bulletin for libraries vol. XVI, no. 3, May-June and July-August 1962

U N E S C O

Published in 1963 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

place de Fontenoy, Paris-7e Printed by Irnprimerie Union, Paris

0 Unesco 1963 Printed in France DP. ~Z/YII. 3/A

THE CONTENT, INFLUENCE AND VALUE O F SCIENTIFIC CONFERENCE

PAPERS AND PROCEEDINGS

As the number of international and national conferences increases, important problems arise in connexion with the bibliographical control of the publications which issue from them. For this reason, the International Federalion for Documentation (FID), on 14 Septem-

ber 1959, signed a contract with Unesco, after the International Advisory Committee on Bibliography had given its approval, for the preparation of a ‘Study on the content, infuence, availability and value of scientijic conference papers and proceedings’. If the work was to be done thoroughly, it was essential that thejeld to be covered should

be dejned at the outset. It was accordingly decided that only corferences held by inter- national organizations concerned with the basic sciences (including applied sciences) should be dealt with, and that the period covered should be I January 1954 to 31 Decem- ber 1958. In addition to obtaining information jrom its own member organizations, the FID

consulted the Union of International Associations ( UIA) and the Abstracting Board of the International Council of Scientijic Unions (ICSU) and other competent organi- zations and persons.

The present report was prepared for the FID by Mr. Paul Poindron, Conservateur en chef, Direction des Bibliothdques de France, who based his work on the results of FID and UIA surveys and such other documentation as was available on the subject.I

The writer has made it his object, jrst, to give asfill1 an account as possible of a y weaknesses in the present arrangements and, secondly, to suggest ways of overcorning them now and in the future.

PRELIMINARY REMARKS ON CONFERENCES

In the English title of this study, as formulated by Unesco, the word ‘confe- rence’ is used, while in the French title the word corigrds was adopted in preference to con$rence. It would perhaps have been better to use the English word ‘meeting’ and the French word riunion, which are wider in scope. W e felt that the word ‘conference’ should not be given a narrow interpretation in this study, and that we should include meetings such as symposia, some of which, in any case, are organized in conjunction with larger meetings. The truth is that every language has a number of different words for meetings.

The commonest in French are congrds, conjie’rence, colloque and symposium, but other words are also used-journies, journe‘es d’itudes, session, siminaire, table ronde, stage, comiti, commission, conseil, assemblie ginirale, and so on,2 although some of them, such as assemblie ginhale, are more properly used for the meetings of administrative bodies. While many people would say that the word congr2s suggests a meeting

attended by more people than does the word conjerence, the two words are undoubtedly very often interchangeable. It would, however, be easier for a reader to determine the nature of a meeting from its title-and consequently to ascertain whether the papers issued by it will be of use to him-if the termi- nology employed were standardized. This, however, is not the place to put forward suggestions, or even to restate all those that have been made. Mention

I. As space in the Bulletin is limited, it has not been possible to include all the supportin!: documents for this study. 2. English terms used include : congress, conference, colloquy, symposium, session, working session, convention,

committee, council, general assembly, etc.

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need only be made of the proposals by Professor Robert DebrC in connexion with medical science, which were approved by the Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences (CIOMS) .l It is preferable, however, for all intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations to adopt, and, of course, to adhere to, a standardized terminology. Some meetings-the big international conferences-are attended by a wide

variety of people who may number thousands,z while others (for example, certain colloquies and symposia) are attended by only a few dozen specialists,% although there are some which have over a hundred participants.* As a rule, large numbers of papers are read, though not everyone who attends a large international conference makes a formal contribution. A colloquy is held to discuss one specific topic, and consequently all the

papers read are on the same subject, whereas the theme or themes chosen for a conference or congress are often fairly general, and papers which do not deal with the central topic are often accepted. Some organizations arrange meetings without selecting a particular subject for discussion, and accept any paper which is more or less relevant to the title of the meeting. While meetings attended only by specialists are usually highly scientific in

character, others may be more in the nature of general exchanges of informa- tion. Professor DebrC says that a large international congress with 2,000 to 3,000 participants is not the best place for the appraisal of new developments, but it does offer an opportunity of making techniques and methods used in the .most advanced areas known throughout the rest of the world. An international conference attended by only 200 or 300 persons, admission to which is by invitation only, can be of great value when the object is to further knowledge in a specific field and to present new ideas to a group of people with a more uniform background than those attending a large conference. A symposium is more suitable for the advanced study of specialized subjects, the organization of practical projects and the planning of research studies, and can be extremely useful for interdisciplinary projects. ti The reason for including the word ‘scientific’ in the title of the study to be

carried out for Unesco was that the study is to deal only with meetings on scientific subjects, attended by scientific specialists. Although it is more especially conferences on the basic and applied sciences that are referred to, it can be assumed that most of what is said applies also to conferences on the social sciences and the humanities. Although the word ‘international’ is not included in the title of the study,

w e have confined our attention, as we have already said, to conferences convened by international organizations and, more specifically, to those held by international non-governmental organizations. This is understandable, since the survey of international organizations has been carried out by UIA. W e should point out that the main significance of the adjective ‘interna-

I. The organization of international meetings. Unesco chronicle, vol. V, no. 6, June 1959, p. 195-99. 2. There were 2,000 participants at the International Conference on Information Processing, organized by Unesco

in Pans; 1,700 at the 4th Congress of the International Association on Food Distribution (Lausanne); 5,300 at the 9th Congress of the International Society of Radiology (Munich). Non-scientific conferences are attended by still larger numbers.

3. A list mtitled‘who went where?’, showing the numbers and nationalities ofparticipants at international meetings, is published several times a year in the review International associations.

4. The 2nd International Symposium on X-ray Microscopy and X-ray Microanalysis (Stockholm)-180 parti- cipants from I 7 countries; Unesco/International Union of Biological Sciences/Italian National Commission on Nuclear Research, Symposium on the Immediate and Low-Level Effects of Ionizing Radiation on Living Cells (Venice)--r 16 participants from 16 countries (Intmtional associations, 1960, no. 9, September, p. 559-62).

5. See the study on symposia carried out for Unesco by the Unesco Institute for Social Sciences (Cologne) in colla- boration with the Sociaal Padagogisch Instituut of the University of Amsterdam. The findings were published by Nels Anderson, sociologist and Director of the Institute for Social Sciences (Cologne) and K. J. Nijkerk, assis- tant research psychologist at the Sociaal Padagogisch Instituut, under the title International seminars: an ana- lysis and an evaluation (Adminislrativc science quartcrly, vol. 3, no. z September 1958). Mr. Nijkerk has kindly added a number of comments, which have been included in this study.

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tional’, when used with a word like ‘congress’, ‘conference’, etc., in the title of a meeting, is that several different nationalities will be represented among the participants. This point requires some elucidation. It is important to decide how many countries have to be represented before a meeting can be regarded as international, since this is a criterion that may determine the inclusion of a meeting in a timetable or bibliography of international meetings. In a bibliography entitled Documents of international meetings 1953, published in 1959 by Robert W . Schaaf of the International Organizations Section of the Library of Congress, an international meeting is arbitrarily defined as one in which individuals from at least three countries participate. Bilateral meetings are excluded-a decision that is open to question and has been challenged by the Centralny Instytut Informacji Naukowo Technicznej i Ekonomicznej (Warsaw), which considers that any conferences attended by the represen- tatives of two States should be regarded as an international conference. Similarly, conferences labelled ‘international’ on the ground that perhaps

three or four out of 800 participants come from abroad have not been included. It must be remembered, however, that conference records themselves are our sole authority for such figures. O n the other hand, the Library of Congress regards conferences which are not called ‘ international’, but which are attended by a comparatively large number of foreigners, as international conferences. Here again w e may have to consult the records of each meeting to find the proportion of foreign participants. In some cases the proportion-though not the actual numbers-of foreign participants can be deduced from the rules of procedure. The fact remains that the word ‘international’ is a fairly loose term, referring,

as it may, to the participation of anything from two or three countries to over a hundred. It must also be remembered that the word ‘world’, which is sometimes used, often indicates merely an intention that, if not all countries, at least all regions of the world shall be represented, rather than that they actually are represented. International conferences are usually convened either by intergovernmental

international organizations or by international non-governmental orga- nizations, but there are also a certain number that are convened by State or private national 0rganizations;l and obviously, when dealing with the question of the availability of documents, we cannot ignore national conferences at which none of the participants are from abroad; some of these are of unques- tionable scientific value and may produce scientific publications of interest to scientists belonging to other countries. A recent survey by the National Science Foundation, Washington, shows that 94 per cent of professional scientific societies in the United States of America organize annual meetings, at which papers on original research work are presented, and that 70 per cent of these societies reported that some of these papers were subsequently published, either in their own journals or in other suitable publications.2

DOCUMENTS PUBLISHED B Y CONFERENCES

Although the above points relating to conferences needed to be made clear, what we are really concerned with is not conferences themselves but the documents they produce.

I. Analysis of the timetable of international meetings planned for July and August 1960 shows that gz meeting3 were convened by international non-governmental organizations in July and 19 by other non-international organiza- tions. The corresponding figures for August are 126 and 25. Mr. Speeckaert, Secretary-General of the Union of International Associations, considers that these figures are representative,

2. See Dues and membershi@ in scientific societies. Report of a survey conducted by Ofice of Science Information Seruice. National Science Foundation, September 1960. NF 60-55, p. 6.

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Conference documents are either mimeographed or printed. Most docu- ments which are produced before or during a conference are mimeographed, as also are highly specialized documents which are of interest to a very small number of people (these are usually duplicated or possibly offset printed). Mimeographed sheet documents usually measure 2 I x 27 centimetres or 21 x 29.7 centimetres, according to standard local usage. It is desirable that all documents published in book form, whether mimeographed or printed, paper-covered or bound, should be of the same size; this applies not only to those issued during a particular meeting, but also-unless it is imperative for the size to be changed-to those issued throughout the various meetings of the one conference. Such uniformity would greatly facilitate the work of librarians. It need hardly be said that all documents should bear at least the full official

title of the conference and its number, followed by the place where the meeting is being held and the opening and closing dates. Unfortunately, the title of the conference is not always given on mimeographed sheet documents. W e shall consider documents in three groups, according to whether they are

published before, during or after each conference.

Documents published before the conference begins Circular letters giving notice of a conference and outlining the conference programme are fairly widely distributed, either directly or, in the case of international non-governmental organizations, through national members. Other documents, however (principally reports and papers, both of which will be referred to in this article as ‘papers’), are usually sent only to bodies which have enrolled as partiFipants in a conference, or even, in the case of preliminary reports, only to the writers of papers. Some organizations publish and send to participants the text of conference papers before the conference begins (these are sometimes referred to as ‘preprints’ or pri-tiragex). This is a system which makes great demands on both organizers and writers. In the interests of uniformity, writers should be informed of the rules to be observed in preparing their papers-the number of copies, maximum length, form in which notes, bibliographical references (IS0 Recommendation R/77) and the author’s summary should be given, and the maximum length of the latter, which should be prepared in accordance with Unesco’s rules and in the same language as the paper itself. Papers should be submitted some months before the opening of the conference, or at any rate well beforehand, if they have to be approved, or read by a rapporteur, before the conference. Time must also be allowed for the printing of any illustrations; limits may be placed on the use of illustrations, but there are cases in which diagrams and charts are essential to an understanding of the text. Illustrations should be sent in with the text itself, and the necessity for authorization to be obtained andfees paid for the reproduction of copyright material-which may occasion further delay-should not be overlooked. Papers should be submitted by the writer in one of the official languages

adopted for the conference1 If a paper is written in some other language, I. A survey carried out by UIA on the languages used at international conferences shows the number of times

when the principal languages were used. The survey covered both written languages, i.e., those in which papers could be submitted, and spoken languages, i.e., those which speakers could use and in which simultaneous or consecutive interpretation was provided. The survey covered relatively large meetings held between I September 1960 and the end of 1961. The following written languages (listed in alphabetical order) were used at 285 conferences : Danish (once),

Dutch (8 times), English (250 times), Esperanto (6 times), Finnish (once), French (242 times), German (121 times), Hebrew (twice), Hindustani (twice), Italian (24 times), Norwegian (7 times), Portuguese (twice), Russian (12 times), Spanish (47 times). The following spoken languages were used at 225 conferences: Danish (none), Dutch (8 times), English (205 times), Esperanto (6 times), Finnish (once), French (205 times), German (127 times), Hebrew (none), Hindustani (twice), Italian (24 times), Norwegian (3 times), Portuguese (6 times), Russian (IO times), Spanish (45 times). International associations, 1960, no. 8, August, p. 484.

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it is the author’s responsibility to have it translated and to send the translation, marked ‘translated from . . ,’. This has the double advantage of allowing the author to correct mistakes in translation before the paper is printed and of allowing the paper to be printed immediately it is received. Proofs should not be sent to the author but should be read by those responsible for the confer- ence publications-a procedure which avoids the inconvenience of author’s corrections. if it is intended to publish not only authors’ summaries, in the various

languages used, but also translations of these summaries, the conference should be responsible for the production of such translations. According to the UIA survey, the present practice is for preparatory docu-

ments to be issued in both French and English, and even, in 20 per cent of cases, in German as well. in his study of seminars, Mr. Nijkerk draws attention to the difficulty some

participants have in following the proceedings. It is often forgotten, he remarks, that some of those who attend a conference may find it difficult to understand an English or a French text, particularly if the subject is abstract or highly condensed or if the style is literary. H e suggests that it would be useful to study the extent to which participants in international conferences understand the documents used. Papers may be published separately, in which case each one can be issued

as soon as the secretariat receives it; if so, such papers should be numbered consecutively (independently of references to a particular section of the conference, for example) in order to facilitate checking and to enable each participant to see whether his collection is compIete or not, and which docu- ments, if any, are missing. From the librarian’s point of view, it is better if the documents are published in book form, but in that case numbering of the pages must be held up until all the papers are available. This is not often feasible, but if the papers are published as separate pamphlets, the type can always be kept set up for subsequent publication in book form. There is one point of paramount importance : the number of copies of papers published must be sufficient to allow interested libraries and documentation centres, other than those participating in or represented at the conference, to purchase what they need. As things are, preparatory documents appear to be supplied only to participants, and are hardly ever sent to libraries. It will be argued (and quite logically) that those who organize conferences

may find it very difficult to gauge the needs of libraries. One way of overcoming the difficulty might be to assess the requirements in each field of knowledge separately. Obviously, in some cases it may be preferable to publish summaries only,

rather than publish papers in full and available summaries as well. in other cases, a combination of the two systems may be best. Some papers call for publication in full, together with a summary, while in other cases a summary is sufficient. At present, according to the UIA survey, summaries are published in some cases and the full text in others, in more or less equal numbers.I Too often, participants are handed the papers on the opening day of the

conference, so that they have no time to study them thoroughly. On the other hand, papers sent out before the conference should be dispatched in time to reach their destination before participants leave for the conference ; otherwise the secretariat will have to supply them with further copies on arrival. Some delegates have to leave their country weeks before a conference begins. Provision should be made on the application forms for participants to request that I. Summaries of papers read at about thirty medical congresses held between 1952 and September 1960 were pub-

lished before the congresses were held, in the form of separate booklets, by the Ercerpta Medica, in a special series entitled Excerpta Medica international congress series. Other organizations, working in other fields, might well follow the example of the Excerpta Medica Foundation (Amsterdam-New York) in this respect.

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publications be held for them in readiness for the beginning of the conference, if they cannot be sent out before a certain date. There remains the question of when the papers should be sent. The staff of the University of Poitiers suggests that they be dispatched two or three months before the meeting. But anyone who organizes conferences knows how difficult it is to induce those who prepare papers to do so within the set time-limits. Then, too, it is not enough to send out papers beforehand-participants

must familiarize themselves with them. Mr. Nijkerk notes, in his study of seminars, that participants had not read the documents they received. This is a great disadvantage in a seminar when it is assumed that all the participants have studied the documents sent them. Ideally, of course, papers should be printed before the conference begins, an

arrangement which has the additional advantage of leaving time free for discussion which would otherwise be spent in reading papers aloud. The most participants would be allowed would be to give an oral summary of their paper. Speeches can be more carefully prepared if they are based on a written text. There are, however, some disadvantages about this arrangement ; for instance, if papers are written some time before the conference, new information may become available between the time when the paper is submitted and the beginning of the conference. The obvious answer is that the writer can always give the conference any additional information he thinks advisable orally, especially ifit is merely a matter of bringing his paper up to date. Simultaneous interpretation gives a participant who neither understands nor reads the lan- guage in which a paper is presented a more detailed knowledge of its contents than a mere translation of the author’s summary or simultaneous interpretation of an oral summary; but interpreters are reluctant to give a simultaneous interpretation of a paper that is read aloud.

Documents published during the conference If everything were done as it should be (unfortunately, a Utopian supposi- tion) , no papers would need to be mimeographed either in the original language or in translation during the conference, nor would participants need to have their own papers mimeographed beforehand, and distribute them themselves. In practice, however, it is not always possible to avoid this sort of thing, and if extra documents have to be produced during the conference enough copies should be available to supply all those who received the earlier papers with one of each. The text of opening and closing speeches is sometimes distributed, although

these are frequently of secondary importance. Other speeches or addresses may also be thought worth mimeographing. Librarians and documentalists will be familiar with two instances of such addresses-Ortega y Gasset’s address to the International Congress of Libraries, held at Madrid in 1935, and the speech of welcome made by Pope Pius XII, at Caste1 Gandolfo, to participants at the FID conference in I 95 I. Lists of participants have a certain value, although many contain errors,

and include the names of intending participants who, in fact, did not attend. Provisional and supplementary lists are usually brought out, but final lists are not always issued. Lists should give not only participants’ names but also their titles and permanent address. The final text of resolutions is a more important matter. The text of reso-

lutions adopted by a conference is reproduced in the general report on the conference, if one is issued, but, as we shall see, some considerable time may elapse before the report is published. It is imperative, however, that all parti- cipants should have draft resolutions before them, in the official languages of the conference, during the actual discussions, and the final text should be

IO

published immediately after the conference. Some organizations are compelled by their constitution to submit resolutions to members of national branches for their approval when the conference closes, so that the text is not always absolutely final. Some publish resolutions in a summary report on the confer- ence, which is either mimeographed and sent to participants or published in the official journal of the association concerned. ‘This practice might well be adopted generally. If summary reports are published separately, a sufficient number should be reproduced for them to be sent to all who are entitled to receive conference documents, as in the case of supplementary papers mentioned above.

Documents published after the conference Obviously, if all the relevant papers are published before the conference and issued in book form for the use of libraries and documentation centres, there should be no need to reissue them after the conference. The most that should be needed is a supplement containing papers submitted after the date fixed and slips listing errata if any printer’s errors were made when the main volume was printed. Any supplementary material supplied by writers may be included in the proceedings of the conference, together with the record of discussions. If the complete set of papers has not been published before the conference

and only some of them have been mimeographed, they should all be published as soon as possible after the conference, so that they may be of use to persons who have not attended the meeting. It is not advisable to publish only summaries of papers, after the conference.

Financial considerations sometimes dictate a combination of procedures- the full text of some papers is published, and a summary of others, but the choice is sometimes arbitrary. Papers published after the conference may be in a separate book from that

containing the proceedings of the conference. Usually, however, papers are included in the volume containing the proceedings (according to the UIA sur- vey, this was so in 23 cases examined as against g in which the opposite practice was adopted). It is also desirable that the volume containing the proceedings, which should include discussions (as in over two-thirds of all cases, according to the UIA survey), should be published soon after the conference. It was stated above that papers should be published in one of the languages

of the conference, the one the writer prefers. The question of discussions is a more difficult problem. Speeches may be reported, in entirety or in sum- marized form, either in the official language used by the speaker or in the language selected by the person editing the proceedings. In some cases, a version is produced in each of the official languages. The 2nd Congress of International Congress Organizers and Technicians

(Lausanne, 15-18 March 1960) 1 recommended that reports of discussions should be prepared in the language of the speaker and subsequently translated into the other languages. Resolutions should always be published in each of the official languages used

at the conference. 2 The UIA survey shows that two out of three organizations publish multi-

lingual volumes of proceedings, and only one out of three issues a number of unilingual versions in different languages. Only one organization in ten

I. International associations, 1960, no. 5, May, p. 307. z. The 2nd Congress of International Congress Organizers and Technicians expressed the opinion that every inter-

national organization should codify the resolutions it has adopted, after a period of four or five years, and at each conference should review the conclusions it reached at the preceding one, providing that the same topics are being discussed.

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publishes its proceedings in one language only, with summaries in one or more other languages. French and English are always used, German in a large number of cases, and other languages less frequently. Conference proceedings are almost always issued in book form. The UIA

survey showed that 23 conferences do so, as against four which include proceed- ings of their meetings in a periodical publication. The latter method is possible onlyifa whole section or a special issue is devoted to the conference proceedings. It is probably more suited to the publication of proceedings than of papers, and the decision whether it should be adopted or not would depend on the relative volume of the papers and proceedings produced. Publication of pro- ceedings in a periodical has the advantage of being prompt, and of auto- matically ensuring a distribution at least as wide as the number of readers of the periodical itself. Extra copies should be printed for people other than regular subscribers who want to obtain the conference publications. There is, however, the risk that librarians who do not abstract the periodicals they receive may not be aware that they have the proceedings of a particular confer- ence. With this reservation, it may be said that publishing official proceedings. in a periodical is to be recommended, provided-as was said above-that they can be obtained as special issues or separate offprints. This applies, of course, to official proceedings, and not to shorter reports which conference participants or organizers may have published. Not that the value of such summaries, often the only available source of information, should be under- estimated; but the distinction between the two must be observed. It is something of a paradox that unofficial reports are published much more rapidly than the official proceedings. Another advantage of publishing papers or proceedings in a periodical is that they can be more easily included in bibliographies or abstracted, especially if the bibliographies regularly publish abstracts from the journal concerned. Mr. Carl Bjorkbom, Chief Librarian of the Royal Institute of Technology

Library in Stockholm (Kungl. Tekniska Hogskolans Bibliotek) considers that the proper channel for disseminating scientific information is not conference publications but the ordinary scientific journals. Papers, he thinks, should be published before each conference, in the form of extracts or preprints of articles published in journals. The Centralny Instytut Informacji Naukowo Technic- znej i Ekonomicznej (Warsaw) holds the same opinion. It should be pointed out, however, that few periodicals are in a position to treble or even double the normal number of pages of one of their issues. Serial publication is not to be recommended, and publishing some material in one journal and some in others has its drawbacks. Not all the documents produced by a conference are published in their

entirety or even in summarized form. This makes it imperative for the secre- tariats of international organizations, even more than for those of national orga- nizations, to keep such documents in their files, especially those which have not been published and might be needed for research. Should an organization be dissolved these records should be transferred to a permanent body such as the national archives or the national library.

INDEXES

As a result of a reader's complaint that most publications issued by scientific and technical conferences and symposia have no index, ASLIB decided to make a detailed study of this question.'

I. Hanson, C. W.; Janes, Marian. Lack of indexes in reports of conferences. Report of an investigation. Journal of documentation, vol. 16, no. 2, June 1960, p. 65-70.

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The study covered 205 publications listed in the British national bibliography between January 1956 and September 1959 inclusive, in classes 500 (Science) and 600 (Technology), excluding Medicine. Half the publications had no index, rather more than half (59 per cent),

had no subject index, 66 per cent had no author index, and only a quarter had both types of index. E-Ianson and MarianJanes point out that the lack of an author index is no great disadvantage unless a large number of authors (over 25) are mentioned, but the lack of a subject index is more serious, especially if the publication gives much factual information and consists of a large number of pages. Looking at the question from the point of view of the size of publications,

we find that go per cent of those with fewer than a hundred pages had no subject index, whilst in larger publications the percentages were: 71 (IOI-

50 (over 500 pages). The situation appears to be deteriorating, for the average percentage rose from 56 in 1955 to 68 in 1959. Publications also vary in this respect according to the branch of science they

deal with, Physics, chemistry and technical journals have fewer indexes than biology journals. Sixty per cent of publications in the former group have no subject index, and 53 per cent in the latter group. In the other sciences, the situation is even worse-86 per cent of publications have no subject index. It was thought useful to examine the relationship between the presence or

absence of an index and the length of time that elapses before papers and proceedings are published. Out of 194 publications published, 67 per cent of the 42 publications which appear in the same year as the conference is held have no index, compared with 58 per cent of the 93 publications which appear in the following year, 61 per cent of the 46 which appear two years later, and 85 per cent of those which appear three or more years later. It is clear, then, that the two or more years which may elapse between a conference and the publication of its proceedings are not normally used to compile an index. Lastly, an attempt was made to discover whether the lack oi an index was

related to the question whether the proceedings were published by the orga- nizers of the conference or by a commercial publisher, but no conclusion could be reached on this point. Investigations made in the course of the ASLIB survey of the proceedings of

conferences which have no index showed that the content of certain papers might easily be overlooked, because the titles of these papers were not suffi- ciently indicative of the subjects dealt with. The UIA survey shows that more than one third of conference proceedings

have an index-a feature greatly appreciated by users, as is shown by the replies of the teaching staff at the University of Poitiers.

200 pages), 57 (201-300 pages), 34 (301-400 pages), 54 (401-500 pages),

CIRCULATION OF PUBLICATIONS

Who, we may ask, reads conference publications, apart from the participants? It was pointed out above that preparatory documents appear to be issued to

participants only. The UIA survey of conference proceedings shows that nine organizations printed between 500 and I ,000 copies, I I printed between 1,000 and 1,500, and four printed over 1,500. The same survey also shows that, in most cases, conference papers are

paid for by a separate subscription not included in the general fee, and that a pre-publication reduction averaging 20 per cent is allowed. Prices vary between IO and 20 dollars, usually nearer 20 than IO. There is very little publicity to encourage sales. Proceedings are sold in

some cases by a commercial publisher, and in others by the national committee of the country in which the conference is held (as a rule, this system is not very

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successful). With a few exceptions, press services informing periodicals of published documents for review appear to be most inadequate. In fact, most of the subscribers to conference publications are specialists

in the branch of science dealt with by the conference (18 specialists as against five libraries). Geographically, too, the distribution of conference proceedings is very

restricted, and should be extended. A fairly large number of free copies are distributed (five organizations said

that they distributed between 500 and I ,000, and one, 1,400). Six organizations stated that they distributed more free copies than the number they sold. Twelve organizations sell 500 copies, seven sell between 500 and 1,000,

and four between 2,000 and 3,000. Some organizations thought that fewer free copies should be distributed, and others felt that outside assistance should be enlisted to improve publicity and stimulate sales. Mr. Speeckaert has some comments to add to the conclusions reached by

the UIA survey. He maintains that far too little is made of all the intelligence, time and money that go into an international conference. The weakest point is the follow-up of what is mistakenly called the end of the conference. With the preparation of the proceedings the organizers regard their work as done. Two things need doing: first, the content and general lay-out proceed-

ings must be improved and, second, they must be made more easily obtain- able. As to the improvement of the proceedings themselves, the attention of inter-

national organizations will have to be drawn to the problem; they will have to be convinced of the need for improvement, and practical suggestions and examples of how success can be achieved will have to be put before them.

I. To see that the subject dealt with and not the words ‘proceedings’, ‘Nth Conference’ or the name of the organization is the most prominent part of the tit1e.l It is questionable whether all librarians are completely in agreement with

Mr. Speeckaert. Mr. Coblans, of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), considers this a practice to be strongly deprecated. In any case, if a conference has a special title, the standard information (name of the conference, serial number, place and date) should also be given on the title page and in any other publicity or bibliographical entry, so that the conference documents may be obtained.

2. To appoint one person, as soon as the work of organizing a conference begins, to take charge of the publication of proceedings-preferably someone who has no other official conference duties.

3. To omit from the proceedings such purely literary matter as rhetorical effects or expressions of courtesy.

4. To produce summary records of discussions, prepared by professional minute-writers, rather than verbatim records. Only essential facts should be recorded.

5. To produce and print the final version of publications as speedily as pos- sible.

W e shall also outline below the measures proposed by UIA to make reports more readily available, in accordance with the opinion expressed by the Lau- sanne Congress that ‘ the task of those who attempt to obtain the transactions of

Above all, what is needed (starting with the simplest point) is:

I. See : Wittmann, J. La diffusion des publications internationales. International ussociations, 1959. no. IO, October, p. 716.

2. See: van Tongeren, E. Preparation and distribution ofcongress documents (Reports submitted to the 2nd Congress of International Congress Organizers and Technicians, UIA, Lausanne, 15-18 March 1960). This report was published in International congress organization-theory and practice, Brussels, UIA, 1960. (Series: International congress science, vol. I).

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congresses ought to be made easier’; it should be remembered that the publi- cation of reports in a journal can assist in distribution.

PUB LI c ATI o N D E’A D LI NE s

Turning again to Mr. Speeckaert’s last comment, we see that one of the main grounds for criticism is the delay in publishing proceedings. Of I I I proceedings (not all of which were of scientific conferences), due to

appear between July 1960 and 1963’1 29 were to be published within two months of the conference, 14 within three months, 14 within four months, 8 within five months, 12 within six months, 12 within seven months, four within eight months, two within nine months, two within IO months, one within I I months, 12 within 12 months, and one within 15 or 16 months. And it must be remembered that these are the periods within which it was intended to issue the reports, and do not necessarily represent the time which actually did elapse before publication. The ASLIB survey of 194 publications mentioned in the British natirjnal

bibliography lists 42 proceedings which appeared in the same year as the conference concerned, 93 which appeared in the following year, 46 which were issued two years afterwards and 13 which were published three years afterwards or even later. M r . Speeckaert considers that proceedings are published within a reasonable

time (the majority appear from six months to a year after the conference), but the opinion of those who have to use them is that this is much too long. Mr. Speeckaert notes the time variation but thinks that it is only apparent and is to be attributed to tardiness in issuing notices of publication and in the publi- cation of criticisms in reviews. Mr. Coblans2 considers that the volumes of the proceedings of any inter-

national conference can and should be distributed within five to six months of the conference, even if publication is in a number of languages and involves complicated drawings and plates. He points out that discussions can be record- ed on tape, transcribed, submitted to the speakers for correction, and trans- lated if necessary. Slides of diagrams and photographs after projection must be immediately copied and enlarged in a form suitable for submission to the block- makers. It has even been found advisable to photograph the blackboard regu- larly in scientific conferences. Editing must be left to a few competent experts. Corrections and additions should only be accepted up to the end of the conference. The above points are repeated and expanded by Alfred Gunther, of the

Scientific Information Service, CERN, in Geneva, in connexion with the pro- ceedings of three international conferences convened by CERN. Mr. Gunther considers that if proceedings are published by a commercial firm

it will usually be two or three years after the conference before they are avail- able, and this he feels is too long. Lately, it is true, some publishers have made an effort to speed up publication by six to twelve months, but further improve- ment is impossible, for the publisher is tied down to his publication timetable. Mr. Gunther believes that proceedings could be published much more quickly if a team led by the scientific editor and composed of scientific secretaries, a documentation service and an efficient printing firm collaborated in preparing them. The proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, which comprised 2, I oo scientific papers, were published in one complete English edition (33 volumes) within the record time of about one year.

I. See International associations, 1960, no. 7, July, p. 427-31. 2. Coblans, H. Documentation in the second half of the twentieth century. Libri, 1960, vol. IO, no. I, p. 23-32. 3. Einige Dokumentations Probleme wissenschaftlicher Tagungen und Kongresse. Reuue de la documentation, 1960,

vol. 27, no. 3, p. 123-5.

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As Mr. Speeckaert suggested, what is needed is for one person to be appointed when the conference is being planned, to take charge of publications; in addi- tion, there should be a definite plan and stringent rules regarding conference documents. Normally, sufficient staff is provided for the actual running of a conference, but not for the work of publishing the proceedings.

VALUE OF CONFERENCE PUBLICATIONS

It is felt that too many conferences on the same subject are held, and that one every four years would be enough. In his recommendations to the 2nd Congress of International Congress Organizers and Technicians, Mr. Rudolph Morf, Secretary-General of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, expressed the opinion that 'the main international congresses should be or- ganized at intervals of several years and should include, besides plenary sessions and sectional ones devoted to mutual information, discussion meetings of small groups'.l On the other hand, one of the professors at the University of Poitiers thinks that symposia for the discussion of a narrower field of spe- cialization should be held more frequently-once a year, on an average. This links up with Professor DebrC's proposals that large medical congresses

should be less concentrated, and that they should be channelled towards communication of current medical techniques and methods. For this reason he considers it important that conferences should be attended by practitioners, especially those who work in countries which are now developing, and also by health officials. As such congresses are intended for general review and commu- nication, they should be held less frequently. A congress should provide an opportunity for specialists to meet others from neighbouring disciplines. A number of symposia may be held before large conferences which require very careful preparation, and a seminar (which is essentially a teaching device) afterwards. Knowledge which has been made available should reach isolated communities, such as hospitals and medical schools in countries now in the process of development. Professor Debrt thinks that, in order to overcome the growing trend towards excessive specialization, conferences should be planned so as to encourage an encyclopaedic outlook; we must strive for synthesis, so that both research workers and general practitioners may be able to ex- pand their medical knowledge, and be promptly acquainted with the latest ad- vances. It is no easy matter to evaluate the success of a conference, for the only

person qualified to judge is a specialist in the particular subject under discus- sion, or one closely related to it. When addressing the AcadCmie des Sciences, in Paris, recently, Mr. Pierre Tardi expressed the view that there were too many participants at the 12th General Assembly of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG) (Helsinki, 27 July-6 August 1960) and that, while it had provided numerous opportunities for personal contacts, the standard of the papers read was uneven.2 It is, of course, more or less inevitable that some of the papers read at a

conference should be of a higher standard than others. Some are prepared simply because the writer has been asked to submit a paper or because sending a paper gives him a good excuse to travel to the conference, and not because he felt intellectually impelled to write it-which does not imply, however, that papers prepared under such conditions are worthless. Some papers consist of material already presented at another meeting or

already published, in a different form but without any important changes- a fact which, of course, is not acknowledged. Others are the fruit of recent I. International congFess organization-theory and practice. Brussels, UIA, 1960, p. 21 (Series : International congress

2. Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des siances de I'dcadimie des sciences, vol. 251, no. 15, IO octobre, p. 1438. science, vol. I).

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research, and others again are valuable in that they review current advances and provide inforn?ation about them, a function which may be of considerable importance, Mr. Ohman (Sweden), Vice-president of FID, who has made a special study of this point, cites as an example the importance of a Soviet paper read at the International Mineral Dressing Congress (Stockholm, 1957). Previous scrutiny of papers to be read may help to improve the standard,

or, at least to weed out, those papers which are not relevant to the subject of the conference or are of too low a standard; but arranging for such examination may entail many difficulties, including pre-publication delays. It may be carried out at the international level by a committee of scientists from a num- ber of countries, although correspondence between the members of such a committee can be a time-consuming and cumbersome process; or a committee of scientists belonging to the country where the congress is to be held may exa- mine the papers, but in that case there may be doubt about the impartiality of the committee; or, lastly, papers may be screened by making national committees responsible for a selection from papers submitted by their nationals. The latter procedure is perhaps preferable. Some conferences are purely scientific, whereas others (for example, a

horticultural congress or a congress on fruit growing) are attended by both research workers and practitioners. This distinction has an obvious bearing on the nature of the papers read, as has already been said in relation to medical conferences. All that can be hoped for is that organizations which convene conferences

will make a selection before accepting papers submitted to them. This would be in the interest of research workers, for with the growing number of confer- ences many of them cannot attend all the meetings in their own field or related fields and are obliged to keep up with new developments by reading conference publications. To conclude this discussion of the value of conference publications we cannot do better than quote the words of Mr. King, President of FID: ‘Conferences are organized for a very large number of different reasons.

In the case of smaller meetings there may well be an announcement of new items of knowledge and their discussion in an expert milieu. Others may essentially be organized for teaching purposes, still more are to allow a general assessment of the situation reached in a particular field of learning. There are other congresses and especially the larger ones which are mainly a manifestation of solidarity of those concerned with particular subjects and at which little completely new material is presented, although much of it may be novel to the majority present. Clearly, it is impossible to generalize on the value of the proceedings of meetings within such a broad spectrum of objective. In some cases new knowledge is presented and its wider dissemination must be ensured; in other instances results, while of great value to participants and to a somewhat wider audience, are nevertheless transient. In all cases publication is less valuable the longer it takes to achieve. ‘One of the greatest problems of documentation, especially for the natural

sciences is the large bulk of papers appearing. Certainly much multipl~ publi- cation of a particular item of knowledge takes place. Even Dr. Ohman’s paper points out that of the original papers 61.8 per cent were not published later in “substantially the same form as in the congress preprints and tran- sactions”. The operative words here are “substantially the same form”. ‘Much more work requires to be done before it can be clearly indicated in

which cases congress papers and proceedings should be published, or at least in- cluded through the abstract systems in the fabric of new scientific knowledge.’ I. This was the view expressed by the international committee for the Congress of Applird Mechanics, which recom-

mended that national committees play a mor? active and effective part in the selection of papers and the choice of those who are to write them. (Comf~tes rendus lrebdomadoires des s6ances de l’dcodhie des sciences, vol. 251, no. 14, 3 octobre 1960, p. 1317.18).

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AVA I L AB I L I TY O F S C I ENT1 F I C CONFERENCE PAPERS AND PROCEEDINGS

Conferences are announced directly by their organizers, through the distri- bution of circulars and programmes; but there is always a risk that this material may not reach all the individuals and bodies to whom it would be of interest. A wider public can be reached by announcing the programme in periodicals. Thanks to the calendars published in certain periodicals, libraries and docu- mentation centres are informed about conferences whose publications may interest them and are thus able to get into touch with the organizers. Certain of these calendars are restricted to a particular discipline and to its

related subjects; the inquiries on which some of them are based are not always systematic, so that they are not necessarily complete. The International Orga- nizations Section of the Library of Congress recently published a list entitled Future national and international events: a selected list of calendars,I enumerating the different sources which publish information regularly on national and inter- national meetings. This list gives the titles of 390 calendars or periodicals containing calendars, which announce not less than 15 events in each issue; all the titles are received by the Library of Congress. There are two calendars of a general character, that of the Union of Inter-

national Associations (UIA) and that of the Library of Congress.

THE UIA CALENDAR

The UIA calendar was published for the first time in 1949 (on the same lines as the calendar published in I g I 2 in the monthly journal L a vie internationale). From 1949 to 1950, it appeared in the Bulletin of the Union of International Associations, from 1951 to 1953 in the NGO bulletin, and from 1954 onwards, in International associations. As from May I 955, a mimeographed supplement of 8 to 16 pages was issued monthly between every two numbers of the journal. The calendar gave the date and place of the meeting concerned, and the name and address of the organization or person responsible, usually mentioning the number of the organization in the latest edition of the Yearbook of inter- national organizations. There was a system for indicating new information or changes in a previously published announcement, and for referring readers to particulars already published in the supplement. The calendar itself gave details of meetings to be held in the following months. For example, the April I 960 issue of International associations gave a calendar for June, July and August 1960. The supplement covered a period of seven years. For want of space, these last particulars appeared in the journal only once every six months. Changes have been made in this organization, and it was decided to cease

publication of the supplement at the end of 1960. This decision was announced by Mr. Speeckaert, Secretary-General of UIA,

in an article published in the Bulletin des biblioth2ques de France,2 in which he explained that ' after giving much thought to the question, it had been decided that it will be easier for research workers, and more instructive for the orga- nizers of conferences, to publish annually, at the end of December, a calendar in booklet form, covering the longest possible period ahead and giving all I. Zlatich, M. Future national and infernational euinls: a selccted list of calendars. Washington, Library of Congress

International Organizations Section, General Reference and Bibliography Division, 1961, 34 p. This list was also published as a supplement to parts I and I1 of the World lirt of future international meetings, December 1961.

2. Ouvrages de r6fCrence sur les organisations et rCunions internationales. In : Bulletin des bibliothlques de France, 5' annke, no. 11, novembre 1960, p. 415. See also an article in the Unesco bulletin for libraries, vol. XV, no. 3, May-June 1961, p. 144-6.

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meetings whose exact date and place have already been announced, with further particulars such as the address of the local organizer, the number of participants expected, and the anticipated date of the publication of the proceedings. ‘A first experiment was made with the publication, in December 1959, of a

booklet2 giving all the international meetings to be held between I January 1960 and 31 December 1961. The fact that this edition sold out within two months showed that the right method had been discovered and that it would be useful to publish a similar calendar every year. . . .’ In short, UIA now publishes an annual calendar in English, entitled Inter-

national congress calendar (Brussels, 196 I), which gives a chronological list of meetings to be held over a long period ahead (up to 1966), noting: date, place, name and address of the organization responsible and address of the local organizer if any, subject, number of participants expected, whether the pro- ceedings are to be published and expected date of publication, and mention of any exhibition to be held in connexion with the conference. This volume also contains (a) a geographical index, arranged by continents or large geogra- phical areas (North America, South America, the Near East) and, within these categories, in alphabetical order of States and then of towns; (b) an alphabetical subject index. In addition to this annual calendar, which is an 88-page publication with

notices of between 1,000 and 1,5~0 meetings (1,320 in the 1961 issue), a calendar is also published monthly in International associations.

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CALENDAR

The Library of Congress calendara is the successor to the List of international and foreign scient& and technical meetings published quarterly by the National Science Foundation (Washington, no. I, 1954). The first issue, entitled World list of future international meetings, appeared in June 1959. This is a monthly calendar, in two parts: the first part, for which a grant is received from the National Science Foundation, is called Science, technology, agriculture, medicine; the second, Social, cultural, commercial, humanistic. Both are published by the International Organizations Section of the Library of Congress. Each part gives, for a period of three years dating from the month of publication, the calendar itselE, a subject index and an index of the organizations responsible, the latter containing international organizations only. The foreword explains that the meetings were selected because they are

organized, financed or sponsored internationally, and have definitely inter- national attendan~e.~ ‘ International’, in this sense, applies to meetings at

I. This last particular, together with the name of the publisher of the proceedings, is given in the yearly International congress calendar (1961 edition) and in the supplements puhlished in International associatiom since January 1961.

2. Union of International Associations. International congress calendar 1960-61, A chronological list of international congresses, confirences, meetings and symposia scheduled to take place between I january 1960 and 31 December 1961, with addresses of organizing bodies and a subject index. Brussels, rgjg, 40 p.

3. Kathrine 0. Murra, Chief of the International Organizations Section, in her article ‘Futures’ in international meetings, in: College and research libraries, vol. 19, no. 6, November 1958, p. 445-50, gives the sources of inform- ation used by her in 1958: (a) calendars, with special reference to small calendars (programmes, names of participants, preliminary papers), (Mrs. Murra also quotes the titles of the principal calendars) ; (b) periodicals which provide fuller information than the calendars (335 periodicals using the Roman alphahet gave particulars of congresses in the field of science and technology, 48 of these being periodicals issued by international organ- izations, while 260 were periodicals published by associations or societies in different countries) ; the publications of international learned societies provide some of the best sources; the choice of periodicals must be revised annually; (c) circulars and programmes; (d) correspondence with the organizations.

4. Mrs. Murra specifies that: ‘. . . the definition in the World list of future international meetings was developed for that publication only, with no attempt to arrive at a universal definition. In order to publish a calendar, the scope had to be limited to the manpower available to produce it. This required placing rigorous controls on the scope which, in deference to the user, have heeu stated as clearly as w e could’.

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which at least three countries are represented. A special system is used to indicate meetings announced and subsequently cancelled or postponed. Restricted attendance is indicated by the terms ‘ Closed’, ‘By invitation’, ‘Restricted group of experts’ or ‘ Members only’. Meetings about which there is any uncertainty are marked ‘Tentatively scheduled’. When the place, date, responsible authority or address is not definitely settled, the entry is followed by the sign: (?). No entry is made when the address, responsible authority, date and plans are unknown. Special symbols call attention to new meetings and to meetings for which arrangements have been altered. Thus, meetings are listed in chronological order with the following infor-

mation: date, title, responsible organization and address-in other words, the same information as was given in the UIA calendar before additions to it were made.

ROLE OF CALENDARS A N D POSSIBLE IMPROVEMENTS

Generally speaking, the calendars are very useful, for while special libraries, documentation centres or individual research workers usually receive advance information concerning the main conferences of interest to them directly from the international or national bodies concerned, or through periodicals dealing with their particular subject, there are still many conferences which would escape their notice were it not for these calendars. The existence of many calendars is justified only by the fact that they report

national conferences along with international conferences ; but in view of the cost of drawing up and publishing the calendars and the time wasted by those who, seeking information about a particular conference, are obliged to consult several calendars, in the sometimes illusory hope that they supplement one another, ought not some effort be made to avoid overlapping? The present situation might possibly be improved by having a single calendar

to cover all international meetings,l together with national calendars announc- ing national conferences.2 In our opinion, UIA and the Library of Congress should consider the feasibility of replacing their two publications by a single joint publication. As already explained, UIA made certain changes at the beginning of 1961. W e consider that it would be even better to pool the resources of the two long lists now in existence and to consider the ideal form which such a single calendar should take.8 Information given on each conference should include not only the name of

the conference, the place of the meeting and the date, but also the number of responsible bodies, and sometimes two names-that of the international organization, and that of the national body in the country where the meeting is to be held, with the address of the latter; but obviously any mention of the publications offered for sale, especially those available prior to the conference, would be appreciated by libraries and documentation centres.

I. Mrs. Murra has been good enough to draw our attention to the value and importance of the (usually very short) calendan which mention only the meetings of the international organization by which they are published, such as the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) and the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC). She hopes that these calendan will continue to appear.

I. For Mrs. Murra, the problem of calendars of national meetings is similar to that of national bibliographies. Each country should be responsible for its own. ‘It would be quite in order for Unesco to encourage the publi- cation of comprehensive national calendars through its National Commissions or in any other ways. If further study should indicate the value of a compendium of national calendars, an international organization might be the logical one to do it.‘

3. The UIA correspondence cards comprise the following headings: name of organization; type of meeting; subject dates (day, month, year); place (town, building where the meeting will be held); number of participants; local organization committee (secretary, address) ; languages used (written, simultaneous or consecutive inter. pretation from . . . into . . .); reports (approximate date of publication, publiste

10

Mrs. Murra writes on this subject: ‘I also have misgivings about attempting to include information on publications in a calendar. These are two different kinds of information, responding to different needs, and used in different ways. Addition of publication information would further delay publication of calendar information. Our experience indicates that meeting information is wanted within ten days of its receipt by the issuing agency and faster if possible. You may have observed that the World list gives the latest infor- mation on meetings held in the month of issuance as well as later. It would take considerably more staff to meet such a deadline if publication infor- mation were included and, I think, result in a cumbersome tool.’ The UIA calendar, with its encyclopaedic character, and the two Library

of Congress calendars should perhaps be replaced by a series of calendars, each covering a major subject, in which case one conference might appear in several calendars. Mr. Speeckaert does not consider that this would be desirable or even

possible, first because the majority of purchasers of a calendar of international conferences wish to know about all conferences ; secondly, because division into separate subjects is often very difficult; and, lastly, because there would certainly be sectors for which no one would take on the necessary work. Mrs. Murra, for her part, observes that ‘the need for the single calendar

has been amply justified by many students of the problem. That it be divided, either as separates, or within one cover by subjects would present many prob- lems. Such an arrangement would not provide a place for interdisciplinary meetings, for example, which are becoming more and more numerous, unless entries were freely duplicated between parts (part I of the December issue of the World list has some sixty such meetings). Publication of separate subject lists would revert once again to fractionation of control which so many of us have worked to eliminate’.

METHODS OF OBTAINING INFORMATION ABOUT CONFERENCE PUBLICATIONS

If libraries and documentation centres consult calendars, it is for the purpose of establishing direct contact, at the earliest possible moment, with the organizations responsible for conferences so as to obtain publications that interest them.l This is because libraries and documentation centres must make conference

publications available to users as soon as they are published, and because, if they do not send in their orders soon enough, they may easily discover that some particular publication is out of print. As w e have already said, therefore, the organizers of conferences should be

strongly urged to make provision, when printing, for a number of copies to go to libraries; they can discover the needs of libraries by announcing their publications sufficiently far in advance. Some volumes are brought out by commercial publishing houses,a but

this does not seem to apply to the majority. If a large firm undertakes the publishing, most libraries and documentation centres will be contacted by its advertising network, but some volumes are published by the international organization or by the national organization of the country in which the

P

I. Mrr. hlurra has called our attention to an unpublislied preliminary study on the availability ofcongress publi- cations. This study was conducted by a provisional sub-committee of the American Library Association’s Serials Policy and Research Committee. The study is based on the views and experience of I I very large university libraries. It is hoped that the sub-committee’s work will continue.

2. Out of a total of 122 proceedings announced for publication between July 1960 and 1963 (these do not relate solely to scientific meetings), 81 are published by the international organization itself, 21 by the national branch, 10 by commercial publishers and IO by other methods, including appearance in various magazines. See Inta- notional associalions, 12th year, July 1960, no. 7, p. 427-31.)

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conference is held, and libraries and documentation centres are apt to be overlooked in the direct publicity undertaken by such bodies. It is a good idea to put an advertisement in special periodicals. Proceedings published in perio- dicals, whether they relate to the conference itself or to its publications, are also valuable, though often appearing rather late; so, too, are abstracts and even a mere entry in a bibliography. Mrs. Murra emphasizes ‘the importance of indexing services, “Notes and

news” sections of periodicals and “Book notice” sections where brief announce- ments and annotated bibliographical references of proceedings often appear long before proceedings are acquired and catalogued by libraries. It is almost impossible to find them unless they have been systematically noted in a general index such as those published by H. W. Wilson and others’. UIA includes in its calendar the expected date of publication of the pro-

ceedings. It might be desirable to go even further, by including in the calendar all available information on forthcoming publications.1 An appendix might give information regarding publications subsequent to the opening of the conference, by announcing them as soon as they are put on sale, or even before. It should be remembered that it is not always easy to discover by whom the papers presented at a conference or its proceedings have been published; it may be an international body, a national body which changes with each conference, a commercial firm or even a periodical. In the July 1960 issue of International association2 UIA listed, in chronological

order of the publication dates announced, the proceedings of conferences held or to have been held between I June I 960 and 3 I December I 96 I. Each entry gave the name of the organization, the nature of the meeting, the subject (where appropriate) , the date, the place, and the publisher’s name and address. The language used in each case was that in which the information was received. These particulars were obtained from a special survey conducted by UIA among conference organizers. Aware of the difficulties encountered by such organizers in bringing the

publication of conference proceedings to the knowledge of the general public, and of the corresponding difficulties encountered by librarians and others who wish to purchase or consult such proceedings, UIA decided to issue two further publications. The first of these is a monthly current list* beginning in January 1961,

and indicating, according to the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) , any proceedings of international meetings just published in volume form or printed in journals. The second publication is to be an annual bibliography of proceedings. Since the majority of these are printed over a period of one to three years after the conference, the first volume of this annual biblio- graphy will deal with the proceedings of conferences held in 1957. UIA felt it would be more useful to begin with the latest works. Funds permitting, writes Mr. SpeeckaerP it might be possible, simultaneously with the publi- cation of bibliographies for 1958 and subsequent years, to work back and cover the conference years 1956, 1955, etc.6 It should also be mentioned that, with a view to facilitating the ultimate publi-

I. See above, page 168. Miss Barbara Kyle (London) considers that: ‘Each issue of the calendar should complete the story of any conference previously announced, with information as to where the documentation may be obtained, together with the lists of those in attendance.’

2. International associations, 12th year, no. 7, July 1960. 3. Bibliographical current list of papers, reports and proceedings of international meetings / Bibliographie cowante des documents,

comptcs rendus et actes des rhnions internationales. Brussels, January 1961-. 4. Bulletin des bibliothkques de France, 5e annte, no .II, novembre 1960, p. 418. 5. For the year 1953, it will be possible to use the bibliography of the documents issued by international non-

governmental meetings held in 1953, which are preserved in the Library of Congress. Documents of international meetings, 1953. Compiled by Robert W. Schaaf. Washington, International Organizations Section (Library of Congress), 1959. 27 cm., ivf210 p,

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cation of a bibliography of proceedings of former conferences, UIA is drawing up the fullest possible list of all international conferences, in the widest sense of the term, held from the earliest date for which records are available, up to 194.0. This is expected to appear in four volumes, the first, already issued, covering the period 1681 to 18gg,1 the second covering the period 1900 to 1919, the third, the period 1920 to 1929, and the fourth, the period 1930 to 1939. The first publication-the current list of proceedings of international

meetings-is particularly interesting and urgently needed. It will ease the task of libraries, which cannot always establish direct contact with the inter- national organizations as the Library of Congress, the Bibliothhque Nationale and the Deutsche Staatsbibliothek, for instance, are able to do. Both publications will be a valuable addition to conference bibliography. The Belgian Bibliographical Commission has published Le ripertoire annuel

des comptes rendus de congrds scientgques, 1958 and 1959, by Julian Van Hove.2 In accordance with the recommendation made in 1953 by the International

Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) the Commission des PCriodiques established as part of the Association des Conservateurs d’Archives, de Biblio- thkques, et de MusCes de Belgique, has decided to assemble annually national documentation relating to conference proceedings. In addition, the &ole Provinciale de Bibliothgcaires du Brabant has undertaken to prepare a retro- spective catalogue for Belgium. Mr. Van Hove’s publication includes the proceedings of conferences orga-

nized in Belgium during 1958 and 1959, and those held earlier, or in foreign countries, but whose proceedings were published in Belgium in 1958 or 1959. This initiative is worthy of note, but one may question the desirability of

grouping the conferences held in one particular country and those whose reports appear in that country.8 Most libraries seem to be informed directly by the international orga-

nizations about conference publications, but periodicals appear to be an important source of information. The correspondence maintained by a few big libraries with the international or-

ganizations would become practically unnecessarywere there a current bibliogra- phy to provide libraries with all necessary information regarding all publications.

THE PLAGE OF CONFERENCE PUBLICATIONS IN LIBRARIES

The majority of libraries place a separate order for each publication; it should be noted, incidentally, that there may be financial regulations which prevent a library from committing itself to the purchase of a work which is not certain to be published. It seems difficult to decide whether-as in France in the case of university libraries-the libraries prefer to order from a bookseller when the international organization is itself the publisher. As a general rule, the pubh- cations of a conference are offered for sale. The libraries are equally divided in their views as to prices, some finding them high and others reasonable. While few conclusions can be drawn from the vague information available

concerning the number of publications received, the impression is that libraries do not buy the publications of a very large number of conferences. The Library of Congress list of conferences held in 1953 mentions 250 meetings of non- I. Union of International Associations. International congresses, 1681 to 1899. Full list. Brussels, 1960, 76 p. French

and English analytical index. (Vol. 8 of the series Documents for the study of international non-governmental organizations. (UIA publication no. 164.)

2. Bruxelles. Commission Belge de Bibliographie, 1960, 60 p. (Bibliographia belgica, 49), and 1961, 89 p. (Biblio- graphia helgica, 58).

3. At the twenty-fifth session of the Council of IFLA, held in Warsaw in September 1959, the Committee on Periodicals expressed the hope that, following the example of the Belgian National Eibliographical Commission, every country would publish annual lists of conferences held on its territory, and of the proceedings published in the year concerned.

governmental organizations, but the appendix lists I 77 meetings of non-govern- mental organizations whose publications are not to be found in that library. According to Mrs. Murra, the Library of Congress has identified, and

recorded in its files, 1,008 conferences held in 1953, 3,249 in 1957, and 2,377 in 1958 (up to 28 April); and in an article published in 1958, she estimates the annual number of international meetings at approximately 5,000.1 In this connexion, Mrs. Murra points out that the World list of future international meetings mentioned 2,796 meetings for 1960; this does not account for all meetings held, but only for those of which the Library of Congress was informed in time to announce them. It is hoped to arrive in 1961 at a figure giving a better approximation of the total number of meetings held (including all meetings reported too late to have been announced before). These figures are definitely higher than those given in International ano-

ciations. In an article by Genevitve Devillt,2 on ‘ Les rtunions internationales en 1958’, which appeared in 1959, the number of international meetings is seen to average about 1,100, from 1953 to 1957; an increase of 27 per cent was recorded between 1957 and 1958 (725 in 1950, 715 in 1951, 996 in 1952, 1,086 in 1953, 1,125 in 1954, I,I 18 in 1955, 1,127 in 1956, and 1,432 in 1958). Genevitve Devil16 has since published a second statistical study,3 entitled ‘ L’Cvo- lution des rtunions internationales’. In I 960, UIA recorded I ,899 meetings. These figures suggest: (a) that statistics relating to conferences (covering

all subjects) should be compiled with greater precision; (b) that calendars and bibliographies should almost certainly extend their investigations to include a higher percentage of the existing meetings; (c) that many conferences are probably represented by their publications in only a small number of libraries. Hence the value of union catalogues for conferences, such as Gregory, and

the list published as an appendix to the World list of scient@ periodicals, rgoo- 1950, 3rd ed. (~gp), though the latter is not extensive. The Swedish annual union catalogue has included a special section on conferences ever since 1956. When general union catalogues are confined to foreign publications, only the publications of conferences which appear in foreign countries are included. The United States National union catalogue mentions only such conference publications as have been published and catalogued separately. Libraries devote their chief attention to volumes of papers published after a

conference and to those containing proceedings, except when the volume of papers is put on sale prior to the conference. It is much less usual for them to possess the other documents of a conference, unless the library or documen- tation centre, or some member of the staff, has subscribed to, or attended, the conference. This is why most of the publications acquired by libraries are in printed

form, mimeographing being more or less confined to publications issued before a conference. This bears out the findings of the UIA survey, which showed a ratio of 30 printed publications to 4 mimeographed.

STANDARDIZATION OF TITLE PAGES

It would in some cases be easier to list the publications of international meet- ings if there were some degree of standardization in the layout of the title page; librarians would welcome this. The publications of a conference should always have a title page headed by the

name of the conference, which should not change from one meeting to the next. If the name does change, the reminder, ‘formerly the conference of. . . ’ should be

I. ‘Futures’ in international meetings, in: College and research libraries, vol. IQ, no. 6, November 1958, p. 445-50. 2. International associations, 11th year, No. 6, June 1959, p. 441-7. 3. ibid., 13th year, no. 3, March 1961, p. 152-8.

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added to facilitate cataloguing. A list of previous conferences and related publi- cations (giving prices) on one of the title pages would also be useful in many cases, as a means of checking whether a set is complete, and discovering any gaps. IS0 TC/46 is now studying a preliminary draft international recommen-

dation on title pages, which includes a special paragraph 01-1 symposia: ‘ IO. Special case of a symposium. ‘The foregoing rules (these are general rules) are equally applicable to a

symposium, provided that the following provisions are added: ‘10.1 The person or persons responsible shall be named. ‘10.2 The title of the publication shall be the same as that of the symposium. If?

for some reason, it is necessary for the two titles to be different, both shall be given. ‘ 10.3 The full name of the main editor or author shall be given. ‘ 10.4 The date and place of the symposium shall also be given.’ This preliminary draft is to be revised and extended. W e believe that to the word ‘symposium’, the words ‘congress’, ‘confe-

rence’, etc., should be added and that the publications of all such meetings should be taken into consideration. Paragraph 10.2 should be read in relation to what has been said above about

the individual title of a conference. Even if the name of an international organization which is organizing or

sponsoring the meeting does not appear in the actual title of the conference, it should be given on the title page; it is not enough merely to mention it in the introduction, as was done in the Proceedings of the International Study Confe- rence on Classijication for Information Retrieval, held at Beatrice Webb House, Dorking (England) 13-17 M a y 1957, which were published by ASLIB in 1957 with no mention of FID; the fact that this was ‘a study Conference of the International Federation for Documentation’ is referred to only in the introduction. As was noted in the first part of this study, the terminology relating to

meetings is confusing; the same may be said of the terminology used for publi- cations; for while the word ‘paper’ (or sometimes ‘report’ or ‘contribution’) is used to cover simply the papers read, the term ‘proceedings’ may be used either for a publication comprising the papers together with the discussions, resolutions, etc., or for a publication containing only the discussions and resolutions. Moreover, terms other than ‘ proceedings’ are liable to be used, such as, in English, ‘summary records’ or ‘ transactions’.l It should also be mentioned that as generic terms used in periodicals, the words

Bericht, Compte rendu,Joint report, Proceedings, Procks-verbaux, Rapport, Report, Ren- diconto and Sitzzingsbericht were considered by IS0 TC/@ with a view to the stan- dardizationoftheirabbreviatedforms, atthe meeting held inLondonin June1 960.

PROBLEMS 01’ CATALOGUING

The cataloguing of conferences and the drawing up of bibliographical entries gives rise to certain problems touched upon by the Library of Congress in its reply to the survey conducted by FID. A conference should always be considered as a bibliographical unit. In

other words, it is not enough to make out an index card only for the first confe- rence of a series; one card should be made for the first, and others for the second, third, fourth conferences, and so on, even if there is not a separate title for each of them and if nothing except a change of number distinguishes any one of them from its predecessor or its successor. A reader should be able to find a conference in the author catalogue, under

1. In French, procds-uerbuus and nctes. 2. AS to the method of dealing with congress publications at the Rihliotli&pe Eationale, Paris, see the article

by M. Dumas and F. Gaston-Cherau in Bidletin des bibliothdques de France, he annee, no. 2, fkvrier 1959, p. 89-97.

its official name, under the name of the organization, if any, mentioned in the title of the conference, and under the special title of the conference, if any. Speaking more generally, where the title of the volume does not begin by the entry-word ‘ Conference), ‘Meeting’, ‘Symposium’, etc., it is helpful to make a secondary anonymous entry, under the first word of the title. A reader should also be able to trace a conference by looking up its subject

in the subject catalogue. Without wishing to offer it as a model, we may mention that the French

standard NF Z 44-060 (octobre 1955) Les catalogues al$habNiques d’auteurs et d’anonymes. Choix des vedettes. Collectivit~s-auteurs includes an appendix on confe- rences which might serve as the basis for international standardization. It was not possible to consider the question of conferences at the Inter-

national Conference on Cataloguing Principles organized by IFLA in Paris in October 1961, but the agreement reached on principles may facilitate the preparation of special measures of standardization for conferences. In their replies to the FID survey, the libraries mentioned many requests

received from readers, but we will not venture to deduce any general conclu- sions from these. It must be remembered that a number of scholars possess the publications of conferences they have attended, or offprints of papers relating to their own subjects sent to them by the authors of those’papers, so that they do not need to apply to libraries.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SCANNINQ

General libraries do not scan conference publications, and the papers presented are not shown in the catalogues unless they are sent in as separate booklets or offprints. It rests with the compilers of bibliographies to provide information on the subject either in indicative or in informative abstracts; but they do not do so systematically, and indeed cannot, unless they receive all material published by conferences on their own particular subjects, which is not always the case. Documentation centres undertake fairly detailed scanning in respect of conferences dealing with their special fields. If every paper were accompanied by an author’s summary (and this should

be insisted upon) and if the papers, or even the summaries by themselves, were sent to the bibliographies immediately upon publication, the interval between a conference and the mention of its publications in bibliographies or abstract- ing journals could be reduced to a minimum. Users can obtain information about a conference not only from the text

of its papers and the official proceedings, as indicated or abstracted in a general manner in bibliographies or dealt with by reviews in periodicals (such reviews are not easy to trace unless they are themselves abstracted), but also from the unofficial reports which are published in periodicals, often before the official proceedings appear. These unofficial reports are in some cases of a very general nature, but in other instances they offer a brief abstract, if not of all the papers, at least of the most important among them: they themselves are sometimes abstracted in bibliographies. The study of the International Mineral Dressing Congress, Stockholm,

September 1957, by Mr. Ohman, vice-president of FID, contains a list of 20 unofficial reports on the congress itself, published in 16 different perio- dicals belonging to 8 countries; these were important reports, for 12 of them were at least 3,000 words in length, and 5 of them contained respectively 5,000, 5,200, 6,500, 9,000 and 19,000 words. The countries concerned were Canada (2 reports), Czechoslovakia (I), France (2), Germany (5), USSR (I), United Kingdom (4), United States of America (4) and Yugoslavia (I). These reports were themselves abstracted, 38 abstracts appearing in g abstracting journals, including the Referativnyj Zurnal metallurgija ( I 3 abstracts) and the

26

Cvetnye metally (9 abstracts). It is surprising to note the space thus devoted in abstracting journals to unofficial reports. After the publication of Progress in mineral dressing (July 1958), 22 reviews

of it were published: 18 of these are substantial reviews, ranging from 100 to 800 words, 4 are brief notices under headings such as 'New books' and 'Neuer- scheinungen'. They were published in periodicals of I 3 different countries: Austria (I), Belgium (I), Canada (I), France (2), Germany (4), India (I , Italy (2), Poland (I), South Africa (I), Sweden (I), United Kingdom (4 i , United States (2) and Yugoslavia (I). The volume was also abstracted in six abstracting journals: one in Germany (Stahl und Eisen), one in the United Kingdom (IMM abstracts), three in the United States (ASM review of metal literature, Battelle technical review and Flotation index), and one in the USSR (Cvetyny metally), but it was ignored in the Referativnyj 2urnal and the Chemisches <entralblatt. Four abstracting periodicals gave separate abstracts of the papers; 31 out

of 34 were dealt with in Chemical abstracts, 6 in the Bulletin analytique du Centre de documentation side'rurgique (these abstracts were reproduced in the Bulletin signa- le'tigue du CNRS), 2 in IMM abstracts, which had abstracted the other 32 papers as preprints (the Institution of Mining and Metallurgy, which orga- nized the congresses of 1952 and 1960, was particularly interested) and 7 in the Journal of the Iron and Steel Institute (United Kingdom). None of the papers was abstracted in Germany or in the USSR. Through indicative or informative bibliographies, users can also obtain

information regarding conference papers which are published separately, on the initiative of their authors, in various periodicals, whether this is the sole publication or constitutes a kind of reprint of the paper as it appeared in the actual conference proceedings. In his study of the International Mineral Congress, Mr. Ohman refers to a

number of reprints (seven papers were published in the months following the congress in different periodicals, with the permission of the congress secretariat), all with an indication that they were read at the Stockholm congress (this essential indication should always appear). Fifty-one abstracts were made of these reprints, which, with one exception, appeared before the end of 1957, i.e., over a year before the volume of proceedings was issued. The various articles were abstracted four, five, six, eight and even as many as twelve times. Mr. Ohman draws the justifiable conclusion that a paper has a better prospect of being abstracted if it appears in a periodical than if it is published in the congress proceedings. In respect of three articles, however, these abstracts appeared in Chemical abstracts after three and seven months ; five articles were abstracted in the Chemisches Zentralblatt after 8, 8, 9, 12 and I 5 months respectively, and seven articles in the Referativnyj iurnal metallurgija after 3, 9, IO, IO, IO, 12 and 13 months. Mr. C. W. Hanson,l in co-operation with Marian Janes, made a survey

of the coverage given in English abstracting journals to the publications of IO conferences, all issued in 1957 (except one, which was published in 1958) and containing 386 papers in all. Lists of abstracting journals were also made for each conference publication, and these journals were scanned with the help of the author indexes for the years 1957, 1958 and 1959. No abstracts were made of the papers of two of these conferences. In the

case of four, the abstracts were made, not from the papers as they appeared in the conference volume, but from the same papers as published elsewhere. In all, there were found to be I I 7 abstracts for 386 papers (i.e., 30 per cent), but only 79 (20 per cent) abstracts from the papers as printed in the actual conference volume. I. Hanson, C. W : Janes, Marian. Coverage by abstracting journals of conference papers, 3oumal of documentation,

vol. 17, no. 3, September 1961.

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In addition, all the papers of two conferences and several ofa third, I 23 in all, were mentioned individually, and indexed without being abstracted. The total number of papers abstracted and/or mentioned was 218 (56 percent) out of386. In the course of research, five reports covering an entire conference were

noted. Some of these included references to individual papers. In short, over two-thirds of the papers published in the reports of IO conferences were not abstracted in the abstracting journals scanned, and nearly half of them were neither abstracted nor mentioned.

‘ LOST’ PAPERS

A conference may, however, include ‘lost’ papers, of which F. Liebesny has made a studycunfortunately not full enough-entitled Lost information: unpublished conference papers. His survey covered 383 papers submitted to four nation-wide conferences held in the United States between 1948 and 1950 (distant dates were selected, to allow for the very long delays in publication). Of these papers, 48.5 per cent were never ublished. Of the 383 papers, 197 (51.5 per cent7 were published, and of these 197,

63 (32 per cent) appeared in periodicals other than those in which the summaries had been printed. One hundred and fourteen papers were published between I and 12 months after the meeting, 63 between 13 and 24 months, 14 between 25 and 36 months, and 6 after more than 37 months. Four and a half years elapsed before two of the papers were published. Sixteen of the papers published (8 per cent) appeared in periodicals issued by the firm in which the authors of the original papers were employed. Liebesny adds that almost half the information presented to a conference

is thus lost, unless some preprints are available or a copy can be obtained direct from the author. According to Liebesny, this deplorable situation is made even worse by the rules

of the abstracting journals. For instance, while Chemical abstracts gives long lists of titles and authors, Science abstractsincludes no abstracts ofpapers read at meetings, unless a summary of appreciable length is published in the ordinary way. In England the position is the same, but as the unpublished papers are not even

indicated by abstracts, failure to publish them (only IO per cent of papers are published in full) does not, according to Liebesny, cause any disappointment. It may be understandable that papers should not be published, but the

organizers should always insist that a copy of every paper be deposited before the conference, and should take steps to preserve these copies. It would then always be possible to apply to the conference organizers for a photostat or microcopy of the text.

CONCLUSIONS

This study should be supplemented, but it is nevertheless possible to propose a number of solutions which-after discussion and amendment-might help to improve the quality and availability of conference publications. The value of conferences might be increased by making a more careful

selection of papers and by drawing, if possible, a clearer distinction between the different categories of papers; this might be done on the lines proposed by the International Council of Scientific Unions for texts published in scien- tific journals and periodicals, where a distinction is made between papers, news and progress repork2

I. Proceedings of thc Infernational Confermcc on Scieatgc Infirmation. Washington, D.C., Nonember 16-21 1958. Wash-

2. See p. 3 of G. A. Boutry, La cooptration internationale en mati6re de bibliographies analytiques et signal&- ington, D.C., National Academy of Sciences, National Research Council, 1959. vol. I, p. 474-9.

tiques scientifigues. In: FID, 26a Confertncia geral. Rio dc janciro. Julho 1960. Reports, 25 p.

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To make the proceedings of a conference useful to research workers, and particularly to those unable to attend the conference itself, arrangements should be made: I. To publish, if possible, all papers (accompanied in every case by an author’s

summary) before the conference; the text of unpublished papers should be available on request.

2. To publish the proceedings as soon as possible after the conference, within a year at the latest, and, in this respect, to consider the advantages, from the point of view of diffusion, of publishing them in a periodical. Members of the Abstracting Board of the International Council of Scientific Unions have proposed that no grant be made by an international union or a government to any conference unless its organizers pledge themselves beforehand to publish the proceedings within a year.

3. To send all conference publications, immediately they appear, to the secretariats of the international bibliographies concerned, so that not only the volumes considered as a whole, but each individual paper, may be indicated or abstracted (using the author’s summary).

Another indispensable measure is for a single calendar to give all particulars of all conferences and for some appropriate means to be found of giving infor- mation about publications even before they are issued. It would be an advantage for union catalogues to show in which libraries

in a particular country the conference publications are to be found. Standardization would also be very helpful, whether in respect of the ter-

minology of conferences and their publications, the style of the publications and more particularly the layout of the title page, or the rules for cataloguing them; some efforts to this end are already being made or are contemplated. All the above measures are feasible, but as we have already said, their

application depends on a spirit of co-operation among the international orga- nizations. Conference organizers have perhaps hitherto paid more attention to the

conference itself, as an occasion for meeting, than to its publications and its long-term influence in the field of scientific literature. W e hope that this analysis of the problem may give them a greater awareness of their respon- sibilities as regards scientific information. The Centralny Instytut Informacji Naukowo-Technicznej i Ekonomicznej

in Warsaw has expressed the hope that, through the supranational organi- zations, organizers of scientific conferences will take this report into consi- deration, and will discuss it and consider it carefully in international scientific organizations and scientific documentation centres. In conclusion, it may be added that in the opinion of that institute, most of

the foregoing problems could be solved by establishing a clearing house on scientific conferences and their publications under the auspices of Unesco or of FID. That clearing house would file either the original or, if that were impossible, a copy, of every conference publication. Its duties might be extended to cover national conferences. It would facilitate the mention and abstracting of conference publications in the different bibliographies.

[A. 18941 $0.50; 2/6 (stg.) ; 2 F