College and Research Libraries JUDITH A. OVERMIER AND ELIZABETH IHRIG Eighteenth-Century Short-Title Catalogue: A Medical Model of the Costs of Participation by Specialized Collections The success of the Eighteenth-Century Short- Title Catalogue/North America depends upon the voluntary contribution of bibliographical records by li- braries. Smaller specialized collections often hesitate to participate because they suppose the costs will be high and because they do not realize the impor- tance of their contributions. This paper uses the medical school library rare- book collection as a model to familiarize specialized collections with the ESTCINA project and the value of their contributions to it. Initial fears are delineated and the management data needed to contradict these fears are pro- vided so that smaller specialized collections can make the decision to partici- pate. INTRODUCTION The Eighteenth-Century Short-Title Cat- alogue (ESTC) is an international biblio- graphical project to identify and locate all ti- tles published in the British Isles and the colonies and all titles published in the En- glish language anywhere in the world during the eighteenth century. The initial database, estimated to contain 150,000 items, is at the British Library. 1 The National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mel- lon Foundation are funding the North Amer- ican part of this project (ESTC/NA) at Loui- siana State University. This unit, founded in 1979 and directed by Henry L. Snyder, is matching records, recording holdings, and entering new cataloging for titles owned by North American libraries. More than 300 such libraries were participating in this proj- ect as of December 1981. 2 In July 1981, Judith A. Overmier is curator, Owen H. W angensteen Historical Library of Biology and Medicine, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and Elizabeth Ihrig is librarian, Bakken Library of Electricity in Life, Minneapolis. ESTC/NA reported that it had processed 333,700 records and was processing 3,000 submitted titles per week. This rate is ex- pected to increase after the initiation of searching of the British Library tapes depos- ited in the Research Libraries Information Network (RLIN) as the matching proce- dure.3 The original ESTC project was initiated in 1976 at a conference sponsored by the British Library and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The goal of the project was the development of a new tool for historical research. The plan was for a catalog to" ... fulfil one important function of historical bibliography-the nourishment of historical disciplines. " 4 The ESTC is now well under way, carrying on and extending the tradition of Wing, 5 and Pollard and Redgrave. 6 The roles of those older catalogs were to identify titles and to locate them in a few li- braries in a union list. The ESTC is expand- ing the location function by the inclusion of a far greater number of recording libraries. Another expansion is the use of a complete descriptive record rather than a short title in I 445 446 I College & Research Libraries • November 1982 the identification-making this in reality a long-title catalog. The ESTC should there- fore be of great value to future historians as a bibliographically organized union catalog. Although this mass collocative function is indeed valuable, emphasis should be placed on Alston and J annetta's estimate that "a very high proportion of the items which ESTC will record will be represented by fewer than five copies. " 7 Even more impor- tant the ESTC is expected to record a lot of prev'iously unknown material, and the ~ort? American contribution of such matenal 1s proving to be greater than expected. In addi- tion, access to the ESTC records will be eas- ier than access to earlier short-title catalogs because the British Library is making the rec- ord of its holdings available on computer output microfiche (COM). It is proje:ted that a COM file of British Library holdmgs will be available in 1983, with worldwide holdings following in 1986 or 1987. !he Bri.t- ish Library is depositing its magnetic tape m RLIN · North American locations will be ' 8 available there. Thus the catalog will be a great boon to scholar;, uncovering new resources, locating; them in a researcher's own country or in a nearby state, or even a local library. In times of tight travel budgets, the location of a copy nearby becomes an invaluable service. How- ever full value of this reference tool is depen- dent' upon full participation by libraries ev- erywhere. Our use of the medical school li- brary rare-book collection as a model for spe- cialized collection contributions began with an examination of the list of participants in those earlier short-title catalogs, Wing and the STC. We found that only a few medical libraries were named as individual participants-the Cushing and Fulton li- braries at Yale, the New York Academy of Medicine, the UCLA Biomedical Library- although others doubtlessly did contribute, as did our sample library, the Owen H. W angensteen Historical Library of Biology and Medicine, under the name of their uni- versity libraries. It is important to scholar- ship in medical history that more medical li- braries participate in the ESTC. While we are pleased to report that the National Li- brary of Medicine, the largest medical rare- book collection in North America, is submit- ting an estimated 7,000 titles to the ESTC. 9 we feel that to serve ·scholarship well, every medical rare-book collection should submit records. MEDICAL ScHOOL LIBRARY PARTICIPANTS IN ESTC After theW angensteen Library decided to participate, we became interested in how many other medical libraries were doing so. To identify other participating medical school collections, a brief questionnaire was sent in November 1981 to 119 medical school libraries identified by matching entries in the Association of American Medical Colleges' Medical School Admission Requirements 1982-83 10 and the Directory of Health Sci- ' 11 ences Libraries in the United States, 1979. One hundred nine, or 92 percent, of the questionnaires were returned. Of these ~09 responses, 83libraries (or 76 percent) rep~1ed that they had a medical rare-book collection. Of the 83 libraries possessing such a collec- tion, a surprisingly small number, 37 (or onl?' 45 percent), are currently planning to subm1t records to ESTC. The range of estimates of records to be sub- mitted by these 37libraries is from 1 to 7 ,000. Figure 1 shows estimations of how many ~i­ tles they will be submitting. Of the 37 partic- ipants, 5 were unable to provide any esti- mate of how many records they would be submitting. Of the 32 participants who knew exactly, or were able to estimate their contri- bution, 50 percent were submitting 150 or fewer records. Ninety percent of the libraries (29) estimated that they were submitting fewer than 1,000 records. As you can see, only three libraries are submitting more than 1, 000 records. Please recognize that the small submissions represent contributions equally valuable as those of 1,000 because of the pos- sibility of uncovering a previously unre- corded title, or one previously unrecorded in North America. The estimate of "available in fewer than five copies" by Alston and Jan- netta should definitely be kept in mind. MEDICAL ScHoOL LIBRARY NONPARTICIPANTS IN ESTC Libraries reporting nonparticipation in ESTC were asked to state a reason. They were asked to check as many conditions that applied to them on a list of four reasons, and Eighteenth-Century Short- Title Catalogue I 447 10 ~ Number 9 8 of 7 Libraries 6 ~ r- 5 r- 4 r- 3 2 1 n 0-50 51-150 151-350 351-750 751-1 550 1551+ Number o ~ Submissions Fig. 1 Estimates of Submissions were given space under "other" to specify al- ternative reasons. Of the 46 libraries electing not to partici- pate, an astonishing 46 percent checked "haven't heard of it" as a reason for nonpar- ticipation. This occurred despite the appear- ance since 1976 of a book and of more than 20 newsnotes or articles in library journals de- scribing the ESTC project. "Other" was checked by 38 percent of the respondents and most of the specific reasons revealed a basic misunderstanding of the purpose of the ESTC or its collecting activi- ties. For example, two libraries reported that they were not asked to participate in ESTC, even though invitations are not required and all libraries may participate; indeed, all are encouraged to do so. More disturbing, 70 percent of those checking "other" (or 25 per- cent of the total of nonparticipants) indi- cated in one way or another that their rea- sons for nonparticipation were that they had "too few books." There is no such thing as a contribution too small for this bibliographic project. CosTs TO PARTICIPATING LIBRARIES Quite understandably , the main reasons libraries hesitated to participate involved time and money. "Not enough staff time" was checked by 39 percent; "monetary costs of photocopying too high " was checked by 12 percent ; " monetary costs of staffing too high" was checked by 21 percent. We wished to demonstrate that these fac- tors were not as great as might be anticipated and thereby encourage more medical librari- ans to submit records. To do this, we re- corded the amounts of time used for the dif- ferent steps of the project as carried out at the W angensteen Library. Records may be submitted to ESTC/NA in one of four ways; the options for submissions are: 1. A photoreproduction of the title, sup- plemented with some collation infor- mation. 2. An ESTC record card (BIBSLIP) for each title, following the guidelines given by the British Library staff. 3. Reproduction of regular library cata- loging for eighteenth-century items, providing the cataloging contains all the requisite data. NUC symbol on all cards. 4. A printed catalog of the collection, pro- viding it contains the requisite data. 12 These submissions are then recorded at ESTC/NA as verified or unverified. In order to be verified , the library must supply " req- uisite data ," which is a complete transcrip- tion of title , edition statement and imprint, complete pagination, and size or format; all these must match file records , currently those prepared by the British Library. 13 At the Wangensteen Library, our actual procedure was to identify ESTC items in the chronological card file. which is composed of 448 I College & Research Libraries • Nove,mber 1982 copies of main-entry cards. The cards were pulled, jacketed for future identification, photocopied five to a page, and refiled. We then cut apart the photocopies of these cards and put them in call-number order. We used these slips to pull books from the shelves. The title page was photocopied, and a main- entry catalog card attached to it. We were then able to reshelve the books and mail in the records. A combination of options one and three were used for several reasons. Op- tion one is rated by ESTC as easiest to match for a verified record. 14 We added option three because we had on hand the photocopy of the cards used to pull the books, and those cards contained the required collation. The photocopied title page, together with the photocopied cataloging, provided enough evidence for a good match , and would prob- ably enable many of our records to be en- tered as verified, thus reducing the number of questions that might come back to us from ESTC. The procedure took a total of 53 hours to complete 1,285 titles. Table 1 shows the time required for various steps of the project. This averages out to 21/2 minutes per title. At the University of Minnesota professional librar- ian salary rate of $9.92 per hour, it theoreti- cally cost $525.76 for the project, or $.41 per title . Obviously there are portions of the project that can be done by paraprofessional and/or student help , and the costs could thereby be reduced considerably. Photo- copying costs were $128.50 for title pages, and approximately one-fifth that (or $25. 70) for photocopying the chronological cards, for a total of $154.20. The project's actual cost was substantially reduced because we used volunteer help. Unskilled volunteer la- bor (spouses and children) worked out well in the Wangensteen Library ESTC project also. We can recommend the submitting methods we used as a volunteer project, or perhaps a friends-group or library-school- student project, because professional help is required only for step one, the identification of titles for submission . The methods used were fast and inexpensive. It would cost a small library submitting 100 titles only 5 hours staff time and a mere $12.00 in photo- copy costs. According to an informal report, 15 another contributor, John C. Attig at Pennsylvania State University, recorded the amount of time it took student and professional staff to use ESTC options one and two. Those times required are shown in table 2. At 3.6 minutes per title for option one, and 5.1 minutes per title for option two, both of these methods took longer to perform than the 2.5 minutes per title that theW angensteen Library took. In addition, both options one and two re- quire more professional time than the method we used. However, neither option took a prohibitive amount of time. It should be noted, of course, that there are other variables to consider that could ei- ther increase or decrease costs. For example, one variable that would increase costs (be- cause it would increase professional staff time used), would be the identification of ti- tles to submit from a shelflist instead of from the relatively smaller chronological-by-date- of-publication file. On the other hand, using option three, and submitting only a photo- copy of the complete cataloging on the card in our chronological file, would have de- creased both our staff time and our photo- copying costs considerably. CoNCLUSION We began our paper by describing the Eighteenth-Century Short-Title Catalogue project and underlining the importance of participation by as many libraries as possi- TABLE 1 W ANGENSTEEN ESTC PROJEcr-AcruAL TIME SPENT Step Planning, reading directions Identify & pull cards from chronological file Photocopy cards Jacket & refile cards Cut apart photocopy & put in Dewey order Pull books from stacks Photocopy & staple Reshelve books Time 50 minutes 4 hours, 45 minutes 3 hours 4 hours, 25 minutes 10 hours, 5 minutes 9 hours 15 hours, 45 minutes 5 hours Eighteenth-Century Short- Title Catalogue I 449 TABLE 2 PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY TEST TIMES 1. Pulling books from shelves (student worker) 2. Photocopying title page (student worker) 3. Adding collation & notes to title (professional cataloger) 4. Completing a BIBSLIP (professional cataloger) ESTC method 1: requires steps 1-3 ESTC method 2: requires steps 1 and 4 Time Required 1.2 minutes per volume (ca. 2 titles per vol.) 1 minute per title 2 minutes per title 4.5 minutes per title 3.6 minutes per title 5.1 minutes per title Source: ESTC /NA's newsletter, ESTC Facsimile 2, no. 3:1- 8 (Oct . 1980). ble. We believe we have also demonstrated that the expense of a specialized rare-book collection's participation in the ESTC is far less than anticipated and should be no bar to participation for any library. As for those critical contributions by the small libraries- contributions that are truly needed-the costs are insignificant, while fhe additions to the bibliographic base are not. We hope that removing these apprehen- sions will encourage more specialized collec- tions to participate. The value ·of the ESTC to future scholars is , of course, unable to be measured in any quantitative, objective way. Yet we are certain that its value subjec- tively and qualitatively will be immeasur- able. REFERENCES 1. Judith Singleton to the authors , Jan . 20, 1982. 2. Henry L. Snyder to the authors , Dec . 22 , 1981. 3 . Judith Singleton, " ESTC/NA Progress Re- port," Fdctotum 12:6 Guly 1981). 4. R. C . Alston and M. J . }annetta, Bibliogra- phy, Machine Readable Cataloguing and the ESTC (London: The British Library, 1978), p.19. 5. Donald Wing, comp., Short- Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ire- land, Wales, and British America and of En- glish Books Printed in Oth er Countries 1641 - 1700 (New York: Modern Language As- sociation , 1972). 6. A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, comps . , A Short- Title Catalogue of Books Printed in En- gland, Scotland , & Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad 1475- 1640 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1926). 7. R. C. Alston and M. J. }annetta, Bibliogra- phy, Machine Readable Cataloguing and the ESTC, p .27. 8. Judith Singleton to the authors, Jan. 20, 1982. 9. Dorothy Hanks to the authors , Dec. 23 , 1981. 10. Association of American Medical Colleges , Medical School Admission Requirements 1982-83 (Washington, D.C . : Association of American Medical Colleges , 1981). 11. American Medical Association , Directory of Health Sciences Libraries in the United States (Chicago: The Association, 1980). 12. ESTC Facsimile 2, no. 1:1-8 (March 1980) . 13. ESTC Facsimile 2, no. 2:1-8 (Aug. 1980). 14. ESTC Facsimile 2, no. 1:1-8 (March 1980). 15. ESTC Facsimile 2, no. 3:1- 8 (Oct . 1980).