SECONDARY SERVICES IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES:
Maurice Bernard Line · Behavioral & Social Sciences Librarian · 1981
Research based at the University of Bath showed indexing and abstracting services in the social sciences to be numerous, uncoordinated, often poorly designed, and greatly underused. It also indicates ways in which both individual services and the total system could be improved. Libraries cannot buy all services and have few objective criteria for effective selection. Obstacles to improvement include the non-commercial nature of many services, a relatively small and poor market, the fact that the main buyers (libraries) are not the users, and the fact that producers have little incentive to improve or coordinate. In the long term a totally automated system could solve the problem, but meanwhile libraries could make matters better by conducting evaluation studies, by cooperating to cancel poor services and pressing for the improvement of good ones, and by encouraging end users to be more demanding.