Indexing, Abstracting, and Translation Services
William H. Huff · Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) · 1962
A T I O N S , none is more cosmopolitan and none more urgently needs coordination and possible unification than those known as "services" since they are, in effect, the keepers of their brothers.An examination of United States indexing, abstracting, and translating services and their trends requires, by the nature of these publications, a comparison with present and past accomplishments by other countries in this area of bibliographic concern.In recent years more and more attention has been focused upon serial services including an important survey of the background and inherent problems of these publications as well as a historical review of abstracting and indexing services for serials.'P2A review of the relative usefulness of 6 science services also produced some interesting comparisons in ~o v e r a g e .~A more recent study of the problems and developments of abstracting and indexing services was recently published as part of the series The State of the Library Art.4As pointed out by Shera and Egan in 1950,5 there is no centralized bibliographic service supported by the United States comparable to the system established by the Federation Internationale de Documentation.The International Conference on Scientific Information held in Washington, D.C., in 1958 drew attention to the urgent need for international cooperation and to the necessity of developing new concepts to cope with increased publications in many languages.UNESCO has been instrumental in the progress made in the bibliographic areas of the natural sciences and particularly by the humanities, where serious inequalities existed ten years ago.However, during this past decade such huge quantities of information have been published that it has been impossible for research workers and teachers to keep up with their own subjects.Experts in several areas have noted