The bibliographic control of foreign monographs: a review and baseline study

The acquisition of foreign research publications has been an important activity of American university libraries from the early 19th century to the present day. The growth of scholarship in the post-war period, particularly in area studies, has made access to foreign research more essential than ever. In this article we assess the extent of bibliographic control over foreign published monographs. Previous evaluations of national bibliographic utility hit rates and quality assessment studies of bibliographic records are reviewed. These reviews suggest that the bibliographic control over general research monographs is better than the bibliographic control over foreign research monographs. However, the previous studies'varying sampling periods and techniques necessitate a baseline study to confirm the asserted difference of these two groups of monographs. The baseline study reported here confirms a lack of bibliographic control for a substantial portion of foreign monographs. Furthermore, an examination of the source of bibliographic records, the presence of Library of Congress classifcation, and the level of bibliographic descriptiun show that the quality of bibliographic records for foreign monographs is lower than the quality of record for domestic monographs.