College and Research Libraries JOSEPH H. ROE, JR., and TH OMAS R. CASSIDY The Interlibrary Loan Service of the National Library of Medicine Both the new quarters of the N LM and the legal basis upon which it operates facilitate interlibrary lending. N LM' s liberal lending policies were formulated in 1957, and use of the service has grown very rapidly since that time. In order to speed up the furnishing of photocopies in lieu of loans, cameras are now moved throughout the stack rather than the materials brought to a filming center. Through .these activities, NLM is attempting to fulfill the role of "a national backstop to local library resources" in medical and related fields. THE NATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINE is known in the United States and through- out the world as the institution pre- eminently concerned with the acquisi- tion, organization, storage, retrieval, and dissemination of the published literature of the medical sciences. The administrative history of the li- brary is inscribed on the verso of an · im- posing, dark green granite wall at the entrance of the new building. It reads as follows: "Founded in 1836 as the Library of the Surgeon General's Office, United States Army; developed as a national resource un- der the leadership of John Shaw Billings, Librarian from 1865 to 1895; named Army Dr. Roe is chief, reference services di- vision, National Library of Medicine, and Mr. Cassidy is head, loan and stack section, reference services division, National Library of Medicine. This paper was presented as part of a panel discussion on the Federal Government and College Libraries, before the College Libraries Section of ACRL at the ALA Conference in Saint Louis, Mis- souri, June ~0, 1964. Medical Library in 1922 and Armed Forces Medical Library in 1952; made a part of the Public Health Service of the Depart- ment of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1956; established on this site in 1961; the one hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary of its founding. " In April of 1962 the~ library moved into its new home at the southeastern corner of the Bethesda, Maryland, campus of the National Institutes of Health. During two extremely busy years of suburban bibliometamorphosis) the library has sought to strengthen and expand its var- ious services. The services of the library range from conventional reference and bibliographic work to the new computer based MED LARS program, which will not only automate the publication of In- dex M edicus but will provide customized units of bibliographic information on re- curring and demand bases. This paper, however, will be limited to a detailed re- view of the interlibrary loan program> since college libraries use this service more than any other offered by the li- brary. I 45 46 I College & Research Libraries • January, 1965 LEGISLATIVE AUTHORITY Under Section 372 ("Functions of the Library") of Public Law 941 (84th Con- gress), the National Library of Medicine Act, the following legal base for the li- brary's interlibrary loan program is pro- vided: "Sec. 372. (a) The Surgeon General, through the Library . . . shall . . . make available, through loans, photographic or other copying procedures or otherwise, such materials in the library as he deems ap- propriate. . . ." On August 3, 1956, the President signed into law the National Library of Medicine Act. Following this action the library began an internal review of var- ious activities, including those of the in- terlibrary loan and photoduplication services. LoAN PoLICY In September 1957 the National Li- brary of Medicine initiated a new loan policy.1 This new program included four important features: 1. The National Library of Medicine . lent material only to other libraries. Individuals could use library materials on the premises, but could neither re- move them from the library nor bor- row them in any form by direct re- quest. The operation thereby became an interlibrary loan service in name and in fact. 2. Although all printed literature in the library's collection was available for loan, the decision to lend depended on a number of factors. It was felt that NLM should provide only sup- plementary service to local and re- gional libraries. Ordinary, current, in- trade publications considered to be of widespread accessibility were not subject to loan in any form. 1 Frank B. Rogers, "The Loan Policy of the Na- tional Library of Medicine," Bulletin of the Medical Library Association, XLV (October 1957), 486-93. 3. The NLM reserved the right to de- termine whether the loan was made in the original or as a photoduplicate (microfilm or photoprint). This de- termination was based on the photo- copying costs, copyright restrictions, rarity and physical condition of the item requested, shipping costs, and any other pertinent factors. · 4. Photoduplicates sent instead of orig- inal material were supplied free of charge to requesting libraries. Such photocopy could be retained perma- nently by the borrowing library. It was felt that the introduction of an interlibrary loan program in accordance with these new policies would not only be more effective but would also be less expensive to maintain and enlarge. Ex- perience to date has confirmed these as- sumptions. Accordingly, the basic fea- tures of the loan policy of 1957 remain in effect at this time (see appendix). INTERNAL OPERATIONS The processing routines of the inter- library loan operation have been stream- lined. The microforms and photostats provided prior to 1957 have been largely replaced by Xerox photoprints. With the move to a new building in April 1962, came the opportunity to introduce a unique photoloan procedure. This op- eration had to be geared to handle efficiently an average of seven hundred loans per day with midweek peaks as high as one thousand loans per day. Under the old system books had been carried from the shelves to a centralized group of microfilm cameras. This in- volved temporary loss of material while it was in the pipeline and required mul- tiple sorting and reshelving operations. Under the new plan roving cameras were designed for use in the stack aisles. Electric feedrails were installed in the aisle ceiling, permitting five mobile cameras to negotiate the aisles like trol- The Interlibrary Loan Service I 47 ley cars. Books are now brought to spe- cially designated shelves at the end of each range. They are then photographed, returned to the special shelf, and finally replaced at their proper position in the range. Exposed microfilm is developed overnight and processed the next day by a Copyflo printer capable of replicat- ing thirty-two pages of text per minute. These new procedures have introduced greater efficiency and economy into the loan operation, permitting an orderly ad- justment of the service to rapidly ex- panding processing loads. CoLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY LoANS A recent survey2 of the NLM inter- library loan operation included an anal- ysis of various types of borrowing li- braries. The general, nonmedical li- braries of colleges and universities (in- cluding departmental libraries as well as libraries serving nonmedical graduate schools) accounted for only 4.12 per cen.t of total loans in the United States and 6.75 per cent of all loans to foreign countries. Application of these percent- ages to the fiscal year 1963 photocopy in- terlibrary loan rates yields a college and university library rate of approximately six thousand such loans. Though the bulk figure is more im- pressive than the percentage, these sta- tistics suggest that the demands of col- lege and university libraries for NLM loan service are reasonable. It is possible that the biomedical loan requirements of colleges are being met by local and regional resources, such as those of med- ical school, medical society, and public libraries. Or perhaps some college li- brarians are not yet fully aware of NLM services or do not realize that these ser- vices are extended to libraries other than medical. Medicine is a broad field and the collection is an inclusive one, with 2 William H. Kurth, Survey of the Interlibra1·y Loan Operation of the National Library of Medicine (Washington: 1962), 49p. materials on such subjects as-and this is only a sampling-psychology, anthro- pology, artistic anatomy, and sanitary en- gineering. So it may be that this paper will open for some a so-far-unrealized source for legitimate loan activity. THE NLM AS A NATIONAL BACKSTOP As Windsor lecturer for 1963 at the University of Illinois, Verner W. Clapp dealt with the theme, .. The Future of the Research Library."3 He character- ized the National Library of Medicine as .. the most conspicuous example of a national backstop to local library re- sources in a specific subject." The three essential elements of a national member of the research library system are con- sidered to be «comprehensive acquisition within a conspicuous subject field; pub- lication of the principal current bibli- ography of that field; and the obligation to backstop local resources in that field." Mr. Clapp considers that the NLM is an outstanding example of such a library. STATISTICS A review of the interlibrary loan sta- tistics for fiscal year 1963 provides quan- titative confirmation of the magnitude of the NLM backstopping operation. Re- quests for interlibrary loans totaled one hundred fifty-eight thousand, an increase of 22.5 per cent over the previous year. One hundred thirty-five thousand or 86 per cent of these requests were filled by either photocopy (one hundred twenty-eight thousand) or original ma- terials (sixty-five hundred). In the case of photocopy orders alone this amounted to filling such requests at a rate of over one per minute of every working day throughout the year. Through this mech- anism, some two thousand libraries around the world received approximate- ly two million three hundred thousand 3 Verner W. Clapp, The Future of the Research Library. (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1964), 114p. 48 I College & Research Libraries • January, 1965 pages of photocopy. One in eight of these photoloans was sent to a foreign library to whom the NLM represents a primary international resource. A NATIONAL PROBLEM In spite of this impressive evidence of the sharing efforts of NLM, there must be equally strong efforts to develop pro- grams of local self-sufficiency. Recogni- tion that the NLM collections, consist- ing mainly of single original copies, can- not meet the multiple needs of reader service, interlibrary loan, and resource development on a national and inter- national basis is becoming painfully ap- parent. In a recent editorial4 the editor of the Bulletin of the Medical Library Association stated, «With fine medical research collections in almost every re- gion of this country, it seems ludicrous that medical libraries of every size in every part of the nation should think of 4 Alfred N . Brandon, "A National Problem," BuUe- tin of the Medical Librarry Association, LII (April 1964) 442. MUSIC MANUSCRIPT (Continued from page 16) For the Burgundians: Bodl. Li. MS Can. Misc. 213, (CCanonici."57 For late fourteenth and early fifteenth- century English sacred music: Catholic College of St. Edmund, Old Hall, Eng- land, (COld Hall MS."58 The most important single source of fifteenth-century music are the Trent Codices from the library at Trent. They contain more than sixteen hundred piec- es, dated between ca. 1420 and ca. 1480, 51 Secular pieces transcribed: John Stainer, Dufay and His Contemporaries (London & New York: No- vello, 1898) . Sacred pieces in Charles van den Bor- ren, Polyphonia Sacra (London: Plainsong and Me- dieval Music Society, 1932). 58 New 3-volume edition by A. Ramsbotham (Burn- ham & London: Plainsong and Medieval Music Soci- ety, 1933-38). The reader who cares to see ho w such manuscripts are analyzed by musicologists can find no better specimen of the technique than Manfred Bukofzer's essay on the Old Hall Manuscript, in his Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music (New York: Norton, 1950). borrowing any journal directly from the National Library of Medicine instead of seeking it first within their own areas. . . . Let us use the services of our NLM correctly and in perspective, so as to as- sure everyone better service in obtaining unique material or receiving reference aid that cannot be supplied locally." Planning for appropriate measures of regional and local self-sufficiency is the next task to which the National Library of Medicine and the medical library pro- fession must address themselves. Provi- sion of medical library service adequate to meet the needs of burgeoning medical investigation-and adequate to the re- quirements of related disciplines which come through nonmedical libraries-re- quires the reinforcement of the national network of library services through which local resources are supplemented by regional libraries. To such a network, the National Library of Medicine can truly, to use Mr. Clapp's term, act as a «national backstop." • • by about seventy-five British and conti- nental composers. 59 Contemporary Literature on Music. The chief writings are the (CArs Nova" of Vitry; 60 the pro-Vitry (CArs Novae Musicae" and other works by Jean de Muris (d. ca. 1351) ;61 the «Speculum Musicae" by Jacob of Liege, a virtual encyclopedia of medieval musical learn- ing, ending with an attack on the new music of Vitry" and Muris and a defense (Continued on page 60) 59 For transcriptions see volumes 7, 11, 14, 27, 31 and 40 of the 83-volume Denkmiiler der Tonkunst in Osterreich (Vienna: Universal , 1894-1938). There is a discussion of the Codices with bibliography in Har- vard Dictionary, pp. 759-60. eo Text in Coussemaker, Scriptorum, III, 13-22; English translation by Leon Plantinga, Journal of Music Theory, V-2 (November 1961), 204-23. 61 Treatises printed in Gerbert, op. cit., III, 189- 318 ; partial translation into English in Strunk, op. cit., pp.172-79; discussion by H. Besseler in Archiv fur Musikwissenschaft, VIII (1926), 207-09, centering on text collations.