The Organization and Retrieval of Economic Knowledge

Proceedings of a Conference held by the International Economic Association at Kiel, West Germany

Mark Perlman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000308822
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: International Economics
• Index: Economics

This book is an outcome of the conference on "The Organization and Retrieval of Economic Knowledge" held in Kiel, West Germany. It focuses on the technology of the library industry and its uses for economic research and the economics of the economics library industry and its implication.

Part One
The Technology of the Library Industry and Its Use for Economic Research

1 The Use of Libraries by Economists: A Personal View

Charles Kindleberger*
MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

The paper, by a 'consumer economist', discusses the use of libraries under four classifications: the personal library, the specialized library, the teaching library of a college or university, and the research library. In addition, it reflects briefly on the current problems of libraries ensuing from rising costs, increasing published materials, reduced budgets, etc. It gives the view of one who is not widely familiar with bibliographic aids, both literary and increasingly computerized, and concludes, perhaps erroneously, that such is the ambiguity in the words used by economists that it is unlikely that mechanical substitutes will be found for informal and personalized techniques, such as asking people who know a given field.

1. Introduction

This essay is personal. The writer is an economist and, to the same extent, an economic historian, with limited knowledge of the fine points of librarianship. Writing it has been, in fact, a voyage of discovery. In the past, I have worked extensively—i.e. for a period from two weeks to a number of months or years—in ten great or good libraries,¹ and for lesser periods, down to one hour, in perhaps ten more. Since undertaking this assignment, I have had a chance to visit or inspect another ten.² But, in forty years of teaching and research, it is appalling what I did not learn about libraries and, in particular, about library directories, books on subject collections, professional bibliographies and published catalogs.³ I cannot claim to have repaired these long-term omissions. In addition to library visits, research for the paper included sending a questionnaire to a selected list of libraries. Returns were somewhat spotty and numerical material, in any case, is ambiguous because of imprecision over the limits of 'economics' on the one hand and what constitutes a book, volume, pamphlet, periodical, manuscript, item, etc., on the other.

As a personal effort, the paper does not deal with the economics of libraries, as for example in Baumol and Marcus [5], which applies regression analysis to statistics of academic libraries, or in Raffel and Shisko [34], which covers formally many of the issues touched upon in what follows.

The subject is organized under four headings: the personal library, the working library, the teaching library and the research library.⁴ In each section a number of problems facing the library user are explored. A penultimate section, preceding a concise conclusion, deals briefly with new problems facing all libraries, as seen by a user-economist. The paper is faintly analytical. Anecdotes abound but are relegated to footnotes.

Books are usually private goods; libraries, except for personal collections, are public goods. Books and periodicals are used to disseminate knowledge; old books, periodicals, manuscripts, and archives are needed to preserve old knowledge and to produce new. For the purpose of dissemination, books should be widely distributed; for preservation and the production of new knowledge, it is useful to accumulate books and papers in a single place, to provide reader-researcher convenience. Rare books, however, are also a private good for the owner, who is interested in their uniqueness. From this point of view, rare books should be widely shared in the interest of the equality of wealth. For use, they should be gathered in one place to provide shopping economies of agglomeration. The conflict between books as rare objects and as tools of research runs through the subject and, at times, results in some antagonism between librarians who occasionally seem to want to keep their collections untouched, like objects in a museum, and the scholar who wants to read The collector wants originals; the scholar, as a rule, is content with facsimiles. Cheap and efficient reproduction is well on its way to resolve the conflict between them.

II. The Personal Library

Students of economics, along with those of other subjects, face the decision many times a year, of whether to buy a book or to wait for it to be provided by the library. It would have been a useful exercise in consumption theory—or, perhaps, the theory of production with intermediate goods—to study with multiple regression the size of the personal libraries of economists. Raffel and Shisko [34, p. 47n] observe that, in 1968, MIT faculty members each spent $130 annually on books (and students SI 10), but the variance is doubtless high both between and within departments. My casual empiricism suggests that, among economists, size of library is a function of subject of specialization, age, income or wealth, office wallspace available, nearness to the (say) university library, its efficiency, and personal characteristics, i.e. the extent of the economist collector's instinct, usually and retentiveness, but, perhaps, in a few cases, interest in speculation for profit.

Subject is critical. Mathematical statisticians go in for hardly any books at all—at most, a few periodicals. The burden of the pure theorist is light, unless he cultivates an interest in the history of thought. An economist with two specialties—say, trade and development—has more books than one interested only in trade or only in development. Within the development field, moreover, there is a question of the number of countries that the specialist tries to keep abreast of. The greatest burden is economic history and, I would guess, that of Western Europe.⁵

Age governs the integral, converting now into stock. The relationship is not simple. Some scholars weed, some do not. The wife of a colleague—call her Mrs Murgatroyd—has enunciated the law of the ever-normal library (granary): 'Bring a book home tonight, you take one away tomorrow morning.' Mrs Murgatroyd cannot enforce her rule at the office, but, after time, wall and cabinet space tend to.⁶ The burden of periodicals is particularly hard on the old. Copies of the American Economic Review for the 1930s and 1940s are eating their heads off in thousands of personal libraries, taking up space and earning their rent in only one or two cases. The constraint of wall space is self-evident. Modern architecture, with its large windows, has doubtless cut the demand for books. I know one scholar who built shelving out into the room away from the wall, as do libraries, but the practice is rare.

The coefficient in the regression of nearness to the university library is of great interest and importance.⁷ Should the library be centralized for the convenience of the scholar who has come there and wants to explore other fields, or decentralized to bring certain books nearer to the teacher in his office?

Something depends, of course, on the speed of cataloguing and the putting into use of new books by the university's central, or department, library. Where the delay is long, purchase is necessary for recent books that are needed immediately. Considerable improvement seems to have been recorded lately in this area, as cataloguing in publication (CIP) and National Computer Bibliographical Networks and computerized ordering have reduced processing and cataloguing time by more than reduced budgets and book output have increased it by complicating the selection process. I am informed that the MIT library backlog has been sharply reduced from its peak of five to ten years ago.

One could devote time to the problems of the personal library. How should books be arranged: by subject?; alphabetically?; by height?; etc.⁸ whether to keep reprints in cardboard boxes on shelves or in vertical file cabinets; the economics of marginal notes for information retrieval which reduce the second-hand value of the book in the usual case;⁹ whether one should take typed notes on the books one owns, along with those on borrowed books, so that, when the time for retrieval is at hand, there is only one source to consult;¹⁰ how to divide books between office and home, for those scholars who work part time at home. The footnotes skim a few of these topics. I restrict the text to what is called, in growth theory, the problem of terminal conditions: how to dispose of the personal library. If the economist does not provide for its disposition, the surviving spouse or colleague must bear the burden.

A personal collection of books may be given away intact to a library that wants it, sold intact, sold piecemeal, given to book rummage sales, distributed more or less randomly to members of the family, colleagues, students, or left in an attic or cellar. In at least some cases, university libraries used to appraise a book collection for tax purposes, accept it as a gift, keep what it wanted and dispose of the rest through the dealer network. Such appraisals now must be undertaken professionally, as libraries recognize the perils of mixing in matters with tax consequences. One used to be able to recognize in the lists of second-hand dealers in New York when the library of a defunct Columbia professor reached the market. Notable collections, such as the two of Foxwell in the Goldsmiths' Library at the University of London, and the Kress Library at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, the Seligman collection at Columbia, Hutzler at Johns Hopkins, and Hollander at the University of Illinois are given or bought and kept intact. Japanese universities have bought the libraries, or part of them, of Adam Smith,¹¹ Carl Menger, Karl Bücher, Werner Sombart, and Gustav Schelle. Hitotsubashi University was given the greater part of Josef Schumpeter's library by his widow. G. D. H. Cole's collection is the basis for the Nuffield College Library at Oxford; the National Bureau of Economic Research started with Wesley Clair Mitchell's books; Erich Schneider's private collection of theoretical economics, consisting of about 7000 volumes, was left to the Institut fur Weltwirtschaft which he headed from 1961 to 1969; Keynes' books went to the King's College Library of the History of Economic Thought in Cambridge, England; the University Library in Uppsala was founded in 1620 with a gift, from King Gustavus Adolphus, of books and manuscripts from the nunneries and monasteries that were closed as a result of the Reformation, of some that were war booty, and of some from the royal collection, etc., etc.

Optimally, perhaps, given the need for spreading teaching materials on the one hand, and concentrating scarce resources on the other, rare books should be sold (or given) to the great research libraries, while ordinary books should be given (or sold) to the poorer colleges trying to rise in the scholarly world. For economists who have served in government, such papers as are left over from those days may well be given to archival sources, e.g. in the United States: the Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson libraries. The tax advantages in the United States of so doing are not what they used to be.

III. The Working or Specialized Library

The economist doing research on a particular problem will do well to consider applying to a library specialized in the field. This may be a great library with strength in the given field. It may, however, be one with 100,000 volumes or less, but narrowly concentrated. Many of these belong to research or operating agencies, either private or governmental. Since the library serves a particular purpose other than the needs of the general reader, there may be the necessity for the introduction of an outsider to establish professional bona fides.

The size of specialized libraries evidently depends upon their coverage in three dimensions: time, subject matter and countries. The International Labour Office (ILO), for example, has three times the number of volumes (340,000 to 126,000), twice the periodical subscriptions (5000 to 3000), and more than 10 times the number of microfilm reels (2000 to 140), of the Joint Bank-Fund Library of the International Bank of Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), mainly, I suspect, because it has been going twice as long, having been set up after World War I instead of after World War II. Both have the incomparable advantage of official status, so that they automatically receive government publications. The collection of national governmental budgets of the Joint Bank-Fund Library, for example, is one of the best in the world. Both have world-wide coverage. The subject span of the ILO library in labour, education, training and management may, or may not, extend more widely than the IBRD-IMF interest in central banking, domestic banking, international monetary affairs and economic development. It is of interest, however, that both organizations have found it necessary to establish faster retrieval machinery for books, journal articles and governmental documents. The ILO has been abstracting since 1965 and has a computer file of 55,000 document abstracts, from which 2000 bibliographies are made each year. The system is known as Integrated Scientific Information System (ISIS) and is being developed in collaboration with Stockholm and Ottawa. The Joint Bank-Fund Library undertook its own periodical indexing for some 500 titles because other indexing and abstracting services are slow, limited in coverage, and weak in articles in collected works and proceedings. Another organization which produces its own abstracts and makes them available publicly is the French Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economiques (INSEE). Documentation Economique is a quarterly review which has been published since 1934, though interrupted from November 1938 to January 1947, and most recently in a form in which the entries can be ripped out and filed on stiff cards. This covers a...