This report provides an overview of the presentations and summarises the discussions at IAU Colloquium 110, which was held in Washington, D.C., on 1988 July 26-30 and at the Goddard Space Flight Center on 1988 August 1. The topics included: the publication and acquisition of books and journals; searching for astronomical information; the handling and use of special-format materials; conservation; archiving of unpublished documents; use of computers in libraries; astronomical databases and various aspects of the administration of astronomy libraries and services. Particular attention was paid to new developments, but the problems of astronomers and institutions in developing countries were also considered.

This is a historic occasion for astronomical librarians because, in many cases, this is your first opportunity to meet each other in person and to discuss mutual problems. Astronomical librarians have always been more internationally minded than most librarians and people, because you are used to exchanging literature with even the most distant observatories and countries, independent of political and transportation barriers. However, some of the problems that you now face cannot be solved alone, so we meet partly to cooperate in finding solutions. This meeting was also planned to learn what is being done in new technologies and information retrieval so that we will become aware of current and coming opportunities and changes.

Scientific Societies have a broad range of goals, all aimed at advancing their area of science. Journal publishing is but one important task of a society. Subscription prices are normally set within the broad context of all the society’s programs. By using a normalization procedure it is possible to evaluate the relative costs and effectiveness of journals. Normalized costs to libraries of scientific journals vary by nearly 100-fold. In general, society published journals are very cost effective.

Ideas are presented relating to the problems encountered by astronomical libraries in the Soviet Union.

For science librarians in the developed nations of the West, the difficulties of obtaining publications from other parts of the world seem to center around two interconnected factors: the number of copies printed of each publication and the availability of timely information about publication plans. For example, as quite a few people in today’s audience are aware, many advanced research publications from the Soviet Union are issued in relatively small quantities. As a result, libraries in the West must often order Soviet books in advance of publication in order to have a reasonable chance of obtaining them. By the time a specific title from the Soviet Union gets listed in the national bibliography, Knizhnaia letopis’, copies are no longer available for purchase. With respect to periodicals, the limited number of copies has an effect both on new orders and on claims. An order to initiate a subscription must be submitted several months in advance of the first issue of the volume which is to start fulfillment of the subscription. Otherwise one or more issues will be missed; only those issues actually published after the subscription has taken effect will be received by the subscribing library. After a subscription is firmly established, there is always a possibility that a particular issue may not be received by the subscriber. Libraries in the West are accustomed to sending in a claim for each missing issue, but this is seldom effective in the instance of Soviet periodicals, since few (if any) extra copies are printed.

Both problems and solutions are included in a contribution to a panel discussion on the free (and not so free) flow of astronomy/astrophysics publications across political boundaries.

Foreign astronomical literature acquisition in China is accomplished in two ways: (1) by exchange of publications between China and foreign countries, and (2) by purchase of foreign publications.

At present there are three different kinds of astronomical publications in China: journals, observatory publications and special publications.

Four journals are issued regularly: Acta Astronomia Sinica, Acta Astrophysica Sinica, Progress in Astronomy and Astronomy Amateur. There are five observatory publications available: Publications of Beijing Astronomical Observatory, Publications of Purple Mountain Observatory, Publications of Shannxi Astronomical Observatory, Publications of Yunnan Astronomical Observatory and Annals of Shanghai Observatory, Academia Sinica. Also several special publications have been published regularly, i. e. Chinese Solar-Geophysical Data (CSGD), Monthly Solar Activity, Time and Frequency Services Bulletin, Time Service Annual Report, etc.

The importance of key words for information retrieval processes in astronomical bibliographies and data bases is stressed. Construction principles of astronomical vocabularies are discussed with special regard to the practice at ‘Astronomy and Astrophysics Abstracts’.

The Universal Decimal Classification system is widely used throughout the world for the arrangement of books in libraries and for the indexing of papers and reports as an aid to the retrieval of information. It is a comprehensive and language-independent system. The classification for astronomy and related topics (UDC 52) is used by many persons whose main interests are outside astronomy as well as by astronomical specialists. It is important that the classification be kept up to date, but the revision of UDC 52 is now overdue, as the last major revision was made in 1975 and published in 1977. It is clearly the responsibility of IAU Commission 5 to provide expert advice to the International Federation for Information and Documentation (FID) on the revision. Persons who are willing to participate in the work of revision are invited to write to the author, who is the current chairman of the relevant revision committee.

Astronomers and librarians have been experiencing difficulties in keeping up with the amount of published literature. The astronomer tries to keep abreast in his particular field and the librarian in the management, control and retrieval of scientific information. The 1980’s have seen a revolution in the methods for information storage and retrieval and in particular the advent of the online database. The speed of processing information for storage has been embraced by all, however little thought has been given to how we shall achieve effective high precision recall of documents.

Many librarians firmly believe the best road to success in information retrieval from automated systems is provided by vocabulary control. Contrary to belief, free text or natural language searching alone does not lead to high precision recall. Consistency and integrity of the online catalogue can only be achieved with the addition of a controlled vocabulary. With today’s technology it is possible to maintain the best of both worlds. The controlled vocabulary is used to index the major concepts of a given document over and above the natural language used within the document.

The methods of the abstracting and indexing work at the ‘Astronomisches Rechen-Institut’ are briefly outlined. Actually used procedures as well as projected developments of the bibliographic data base ‘Astronomy and Astrophysics Abstracts’ are summarized.

Online searches may be performed in astronomy and astrophysics either by OBJECT or by SUBJECT. Until recently, although object searches could be performed on a variety of databases in the physical sciences, results were poor and incomplete. Only if an object were mentioned by name in the title or abstract could one hope for any hits at all. The greatest blessing to befall the astronomical community was the advent of SIMBAD (Sets of Identifications, Measurements and Bibliography for Astronomical Data), a database in which searches are conducted by OBJECT only. It is produced and accessible from the Centre de Donnees de Strasbourg (CDS), Observatoire Astronomique, and is the result of many years of arduous work by a few dedicated astronomers and computer scientists. It is comprised of the merging of two earlier databases, the Catalog of Stellar Identifications (CSI) and the Bibliographical Star Index (BSI)