The use of foreign periodicals in the National Technical Library, Hungary (first publicalion)

Abstract

NTL conducted a usage survey ot its holding of foreign serial publications from 1 September to 30 November, 1985, utilizing the computer file of foreign periodicals of the coordination commiitee of special libraries in Hungary. The objectives of this survey were to search for optimum acquisition polícies, to improve circulalton control, and to develop rules of differentiated storage of periodicals. The survey covered 3845 periodicals divided into various domains: journals not used during the survey, secondary publications, journals processed for the information services of NTL, journals used for library services.
This first publication of the findings covers the composition of the first three domains. lt was found that a part of the theoretical journals in science was completely out of usage, and that a relatively high number of ephemeral bulletins is alsó redundant. This result leads to various coordination and super-vision problems. The conclusion is that the acquisition list of foreign journal should be analyzed more carefully, and further acquisition of journals found to be superfluous should be stopped immediately.