Deselection, which criterias : the position of the British Library

Deselection, Which Criterias?
The Position of the British Library

Mike Crump
Director of Reader Services & Collection Development
British Library

This paper has been delivered at the open session of the research group Poldoc,
in the Public Library of Lyon ( 17th may 2001)

I am happy to be here to speak to you today however, in all that I say you should, of course, be aware that I speak on behalf of a national library with perhaps very different responsibilities from university libraries. In short, we probably dispose of less material and under very tight guidelines. In my country the issue of collection development is increasingly being seen as a question of co-operation. Since collection development and collection disposal are seen to be two sides of the same coin, inevitably disposals will, I suspect, be seen in the light of national provision and not an issue for libraries to decide in isolation.

While the issue of disposals creates much indignation it has been taking place almost since the British Museum (and the British Museum Library which now forms a part of the British Library) was founded in 1753. The British Museum Trustees were empowered by Parliament to sell or exchange duplicates in 1767, to sell or exchange objects unfit to be retained in the collections in 1807, to give away duplicates in 1878 (excluding items in the Kings Library, the Cracherode, Banks or Grenville collections, or of material presented to the BM). In 1890 Richard Garnett, who held the view that one copy of a book in the Library was sufficient, took advantage of the 1878 Act to dispose of duplicates to some thirty-seven libraries. This policy continued for many years and was generally fuelled by the ever-increasing demands for space in the Bloomsbury building. In 1900 the Trustees of the British Museum sought to transfer their files of local newspapers or other material, of dates not earlier that 1837, to the charge of boroughs or counties in England and Scotland and to destroy any valueless material, whether duplicate or not, not earlier than 1660. They were not at odds with their age. I note that the Advocates Library, the forerunner of the National Library of Scotland, did not claim under legal deposit legislation the regional newspapers of the nation thus bequeathing to the NLS a relatively poor collection in this area (and certainly by comparison with the Newspaper Library). Once again, the desire to solve the problem of newspapers, was induced by pressures of space, however, because of the British Museum Act, the move to rid themselves of newspapers required legislation. This was, in fact, introduced into Parliament in 1900. A lobby was successfully formed to prevent the Bill being enacted and the Museum purchased land for off-site storage in Hendon (now more generally referred to as Colindale). A newspaper repository was built in 1905, when UK provincial newspapers moved it. The space in this repository was exhausted within twenty years, and, after a Royal Commission on National Museums and Galleries recommended it, a new store and a reading room were built and opened in 1932.

The current formal position is defined in the 1972 Act of Parliament which brought into being the British Library. The schedule of the British Library Act 1972 sets out the Incidental powers of the British Library Board with respect to disposals, and The Museums and Galleries Act 1992 added to these powers. The powers of the Board shall include power to acquire or dispose of any property, whether or not for the purposes of their collections, but subject to the following sub-paragraphs. The power of the Board to dispose of an article transferred to them by section 3 (1) (a) of this Act [i.e. material from the British Museum upon the creation of the British Library] shall be exercisable only if :
- It is a duplicate of another article in the Boards collections (whether or not so transferred), or
- It appears to the Board to have been printed not earlier than the year 1850, and a copy of that article made by photography or a process akin to photography is held by the Board, or
- In the opinion of the Board it is unfit to be retained in their collections and can be disposed of without detriment to the interests of students; or
- The disposal is an exercise of the power conferred by section 6 of The Museums and Galleries Act 1992 [i.e. to transfer, by means of sale, gift or exchange, an object to certain other collections specified under that Act].

More often the Library has sought to prevent disposal by drawing a tighter definition of what is to be acquired. In response to the decision by government to cut the size of the planned new building at St Pancras, The British Library commissioned a Review of Acquisition and Retention Policy (RARP). Under the chairmanship of Brian Enright, the Librarian of Newcastle University, the review reported its findings which were published under the title of Selection for Survival. The report was widely circulated at the time (1989) and received considerable publicity. It makes sixteen recommendations, covering the criteria for accepting items into the collections and the cataloguing treatment for the items selected. The categories of material range from government publications through anonymous childrens books to bibles and prayer books. The title is worth reflecting upon since it highlights the difficult choices that have to be made when space is limited. Given the remit of the group, you will also note that the recommendations are directed at defining more tightly what comes in rather than disposing of material already held.

Obviously, the context in which we discuss disposal is set by our collection development policies. Our determination to preserve the national archive is what has encouraged us to get government to extend legal deposit however, that extension may have to be bought by a tighter application of legal deposit with regard to print. We prefer to be clear about what we acquire so that we do not have the costs associated with disposing of material. By costs here I mean not only the financial cost of staff weeding material from the collections but also the cost of the negative publicity which such exercises can create. One of the recent attacks in the press about disposals centred precisely upon our efforts to implement the recommendations of Selection for Survival. There was a concern that we had disposed of between 70,000 and 80,000 North American official publications. The whole problem had its roots in exchange agreements that had not been adequately managed. The material should not have come into the Library and, if had not, we would not have been in the position of having to get rid of it which involved us both in costs and bad publicity. That is not to say that the British Library does not get rid of material.

The letter of invitation to speak at this gathering made reference to significant publicity that the British Library received about disposals in the autumn of last year. Since that was the case I should like to disentangle the myth from the reality and then I should like to discuss what our policies are and how we see them developing into the future. There were, in effect, two strands to the newspaper coverage of disposals last year. The first concerned newspapers (particularly American newspapers) but, in some respects, the most damaging, concerned a story about the disposal of monograph material, including an item we had received on legal deposit. I should like therefore to be absolutely clear that we do not, nor do we have plans to, dispose of material received under legal deposit. This is fundamental for a library that is the beneficiary of legal deposit.

We were initially attacked for having got rid of an item that had been received under legal deposit. It was later admitted by the person who had notified the journalist, that the book that led to the outrage in the newspapers, had not belonged to the British Library but rather to the British Library Economic and Political Science (or the London School of Economics library). We received a very half-hearted apology from the person who had led the storm and we tried to get a right of redress in the newspapers but the story was already published and there was no interest in the truth. If there is a lesson to be drawn from this story it concerns cataloguing, not disposal. We could not rapidly refute the story in the paper because we could not hold up the book and demonstrate we still had it. The reason that we could not do that was that it still languished in a cataloguing backlog.

As I assume you all know, the privilege to receive free copies of items under legal deposit belongs to six libraries. They are the British Library and the two national libraries of Wales and of Scotland, the university libraries of Oxford and Cambridge and, finally, a quirk of history: Trinity College, Dublin. The British Library aims to take in everything that is required to be deposited and the other five libraries select to a greater or a lesser degree. When the British Library was founded in 1973 it brought into the national library the creation of the national bibliography and therefore the description of material received on deposit. Despite all predictions of the computer industry that the book is dead, the number of publications each year has risen and risen. There have been years when a plateau has been reached but the number has subsequently moved up again. Between 1998/99 and 1999/2000 the increase was 13%.

Under these kinds of pressure, the copyright libraries have increasingly co-operated in the cataloguing of the material. This is a trend that is set to continue and expand. I shall return to it in a moment. We currently have no right to the legal deposit of material that is published not on paper but on CD-ROM or online. The government agency to which we report, the Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS), is very sympathetic and last summer was drafting legislation. However, the measure was not announced in the Queens speech, the legislative programme for the next session of Parliament, and we shall have now to wait for the outcome of the general election. In the mean time we have a system of voluntary deposit for hand-held electronic material which came into being on January 1^st 2000. In the first year of its existence it led to the deposit of 600 items from 149 different publishers. This is not much but it is better than nothing and at least gives us practical experience of handling this material and understanding the resources required to do so.

The online environment remains a huge challenge for us and sets a different kind of agenda that perhaps impacts on the practices for print. Let me reflect on this for a brief moment. The principle underlying deposit is that a nation should endeavour to preserve a complete record of its intellectual output in any given period for the benefit of future generations. However, putting aside the complexity of deciding, in this new environment, What is a national publication? we are conscious that we shall find it almost impossible to harvest the intellectual output that finds its expression on the Web. For the first time we shall have to be selective. But there is an attraction to taking everything. There are no staff costs associated with doing so. There may be additional on-going costs of having taken in more material but, in the national library context, they are justified by national need. Thus we face very considerable costs right at the point of selection that we are not currently paying to build the print archive. More fundamentally, though, we shall select for the first time when we have previously sought to be all-embracing. We believe this to be so fundamental a shift, having long-term consequences for the view of intellectual progress, that we shall go out to national consultation later this month.

Confronting this electronic issue has implications, it seems to me, for how one views the current position with regard to print publications. The two have come to be linked whether we, as the national library, like it or not. Clear signals have been given by Government that we will not secure the legal deposit of electronic material without taking a much harder look at the practices that currently operate. From the publishers perspective this relates to the need to deposit six copies. From the libraries perspective this relates to the need to be much clearer about efficiencies across the UK library economy as a whole. The determination to collaborate has been an increasing trend for libraries because of declining budgets. Thus, as I mentioned earlier, the legal deposit libraries have for many years collaborated over the cataloguing of the intake. We have also collaborated (both nationally and internationally) over what we decide to microfilm. This co-operation, in the English-speaking world has been exemplified by model contracts for commercial filming and in registers of microfilm master negatives. EROMM, maintained at Göttingen University, and fed by libraries throughout Europe is a good example of international co-operation. It assumes that there is no point in microfilming a text for preservation purposes more than once. If we are informed about what others have filmed we can spend our scarce resources wisely on items that no-one has previously filmed and thereby cover more.

However, in addition to this, Government, in pursuit of an agenda that makes collections accessible for the many, not the few, and a drive to make all citizens much more computer-literate, has recognised the power of the library system to facilitate their agenda. They are funding networks and digitisation with tens of millions of pounds but they also bring to libraries a single, central view that sees the whole much more clearly than the constituent parts. The single view, when pressed for more university library buildings, raises questions about the need to hold (long-term) more than one copy of any item. Now that we all hold computer catalogues and we, and our users, can see what others hold, the justification of unwitting duplication is no longer sustainable. It may well be that there is a need to keep in duplicate some key texts on the basis of use by scholars but it is not immediately obvious why so much of the print archive should be kept in multiple copies. This is currently driving libraries in my country to consider the issue of long-term storage. Most university libraries retain back-runs of scientific periodicals. Many of the libraries have also taken out subscriptions to JSTOR so as to have those journals in electronic form for the convenience of their users. Very few, as far as I am aware, have followed the economic model proposed by JSTOR and disposed of their print-runs to save space (and therefore money) to off-set the cost of their subscriptions.

This progress also embraces disposal. The same motivation, driven by better communication and the availability of catalogues online makes the disposal of material something that we increasingly believe could be better co-ordinated. We are encouraged in this belief by having already, in embryo, an example of co-operative disposal. It is called Booknet (about to be relaunched as a Web service and renamed BookTrove http://www.bl.uk/services/booknet/ ). Booknet is a service that the Library runs largely on behalf of the public library sector. One might argue that it represents the responsible way in which libraries can dispose of material. Booknet collects material from libraries and checks it to see if we require a copy ourselves for the national collection. If we do, the item is added to BL stock. Material that is not wanted is briefly catalogued and sent out to libraries to see if the items can be placed for a nominal sum (which is set to cover the cost of the work involved). In future we shall offer the lists on the Web and save the cost of printing and distribution. It will also widen considerably the number of people and organisations that can benefit from the service.

Already, as we begin formally to co-operate over collection development we are having to extend those agreements to cover access, preservation and, ultimately, retention. The last is relevant because a university, for instance, in becoming the national centre for a particular subject is assuming a national role with respect to the material that it collects. Its first responsibility, obviously, is to the research community it serves. However, if that research role makes it admirably placed to assume a national role it seems logical to assume that the nature of the collection under its care also changes. As you might imagine, these are very difficult issues that touch upon the very autonomy of the universities and will need to be discussed at length. However, we have recently created the body to open up and resolve such matters. The three national libraries, together with the Higher Education Funding Council have agreed to form a strategic advisory group on research libraries. For the first time we shall have a body which not only takes a view of research library provision, nationally but also has financial control with which to encourage libraries to co-operate with its strategy. This looks set fair to make significant change in the picture regarding disposals where it is increasingly possible that libraries will no longer take these decisions in isolation but will seek to fit with the requirements of the nation.

Thus the British Library policy for disposals stands at a cross roads. We currently maintain the policy that I set out at the beginning of this talk but we anticipate that it will soon modify to adopt at least a nation-wide vision. And, who knows, given that we already have a European perspective with regard to microfilming, perhaps we will develop a European vision with regard to disposals.

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	Auteur Mike Crump Type de document Intervention à la journée d'études de Poldoc le 17 mai 2001 Date 2001		Deselection, Which Criterias? The Position of the British Library Mike Crump Director of Reader Services & Collection Development British Library This paper has been delivered at the open session of the research group Poldoc, in the Public Library of Lyon ( 17th may 2001) I am happy to be here to speak to you today however, in all that I say you should, of course, be aware that I speak on behalf of a national library with perhaps very different responsibilities from university libraries. In short, we probably dispose of less material and under very tight guidelines. In my country the issue of collection development is increasingly being seen as a question of co-operation. Since collection development and collection disposal are seen to be two sides of the same coin, inevitably disposals will, I suspect, be seen in the light of national provision and not an issue for libraries to decide in isolation. While the issue of disposals creates much indignation it has been taking place almost since the British Museum (and the British Museum Library which now forms a part of the British Library) was founded in 1753. The British Museum Trustees were empowered by Parliament to sell or exchange duplicates in 1767, to sell or exchange objects unfit to be retained in the collections in 1807, to give away duplicates in 1878 (excluding items in the Kings Library, the Cracherode, Banks or Grenville collections, or of material presented to the BM). In 1890 Richard Garnett, who held the view that one copy of a book in the Library was sufficient, took advantage of the 1878 Act to dispose of duplicates to some thirty-seven libraries. This policy continued for many years and was generally fuelled by the ever-increasing demands for space in the Bloomsbury building. In 1900 the Trustees of the British Museum sought to transfer their files of local newspapers or other material, of dates not earlier that 1837, to the charge of boroughs or counties in England and Scotland and to destroy any valueless material, whether duplicate or not, not earlier than 1660. They were not at odds with their age. I note that the Advocates Library, the forerunner of the National Library of Scotland, did not claim under legal deposit legislation the regional newspapers of the nation thus bequeathing to the NLS a relatively poor collection in this area (and certainly by comparison with the Newspaper Library). Once again, the desire to solve the problem of newspapers, was induced by pressures of space, however, because of the British Museum Act, the move to rid themselves of newspapers required legislation. This was, in fact, introduced into Parliament in 1900. A lobby was successfully formed to prevent the Bill being enacted and the Museum purchased land for off-site storage in Hendon (now more generally referred to as Colindale). A newspaper repository was built in 1905, when UK provincial newspapers moved it. The space in this repository was exhausted within twenty years, and, after a Royal Commission on National Museums and Galleries recommended it, a new store and a reading room were built and opened in 1932. The current formal position is defined in the 1972 Act of Parliament which brought into being the British Library. The schedule of the British Library Act 1972 sets out the Incidental powers of the British Library Board with respect to disposals, and The Museums and Galleries Act 1992 added to these powers. The powers of the Board shall include power to acquire or dispose of any property, whether or not for the purposes of their collections, but subject to the following sub-paragraphs. The power of the Board to dispose of an article transferred to them by section 3 (1) (a) of this Act [i.e. material from the British Museum upon the creation of the British Library] shall be exercisable only if : - It is a duplicate of another article in the Boards collections (whether or not so transferred), or - It appears to the Board to have been printed not earlier than the year 1850, and a copy of that article made by photography or a process akin to photography is held by the Board, or - In the opinion of the Board it is unfit to be retained in their collections and can be disposed of without detriment to the interests of students; or - The disposal is an exercise of the power conferred by section 6 of The Museums and Galleries Act 1992 [i.e. to transfer, by means of sale, gift or exchange, an object to certain other collections specified under that Act]. More often the Library has sought to prevent disposal by drawing a tighter definition of what is to be acquired. In response to the decision by government to cut the size of the planned new building at St Pancras, The British Library commissioned a Review of Acquisition and Retention Policy (RARP). Under the chairmanship of Brian Enright, the Librarian of Newcastle University, the review reported its findings which were published under the title of *Selection for Survival. The report was widely circulated at the time (1989) and received considerable publicity. It makes sixteen recommendations, covering the criteria for accepting items into the collections and the cataloguing treatment for the items selected. The categories of material range from government publications through anonymous childrens books to bibles and prayer books. The title is worth reflecting upon since it highlights the difficult choices that have to be made when space is limited. Given the remit of the group, you will also note that the recommendations are directed at defining more tightly what comes in rather than disposing of material already held. Obviously, the context in which we discuss disposal is set by our collection development policies. Our determination to preserve the national archive is what has encouraged us to get government to extend legal deposit however, that extension may have to be bought by a tighter application of legal deposit with regard to print. We prefer to be clear about what we acquire so that we do not have the costs associated with disposing of material. By costs here I mean not only the financial cost of staff weeding material from the collections but also the cost of the negative publicity which such exercises can create. One of the recent attacks in the press about disposals centred precisely upon our efforts to implement the recommendations of Selection for Survival. There was a concern that we had disposed of between 70,000 and 80,000 North American official publications. The whole problem had its roots in exchange agreements that had not been adequately managed. The material should not have come into the Library and, if had not, we would not have been in the position of having to get rid of it which involved us both in costs and bad publicity. That is not to say that the British Library does not get rid of material. The letter of invitation to speak at this gathering made reference to significant publicity that the British Library received about disposals in the autumn of last year. Since that was the case I should like to disentangle the myth from the reality and then I should like to discuss what our policies are and how we see them developing into the future. There were, in effect, two strands to the newspaper coverage of disposals last year. The first concerned newspapers (particularly American newspapers) but, in some respects, the most damaging, concerned a story about the disposal of monograph material, including an item we had received on legal deposit. I should like therefore to be absolutely clear that we do not, nor do we have plans to, dispose of material received under legal deposit. This is fundamental for a library that is the beneficiary of legal deposit. We were initially attacked for having got rid of an item that had been received under legal deposit. It was later admitted by the person who had notified the journalist, that the book that led to the outrage in the newspapers, had not belonged to the British Library but rather to the British Library Economic and Political Science (or the London School of Economics library). We received a very half-hearted apology from the person who had led the storm and we tried to get a right of redress in the newspapers but the story was already published and there was no interest in the truth. If there is a lesson to be drawn from this story it concerns cataloguing, not disposal. We could not rapidly refute the story in the paper because we could not hold up the book and demonstrate we still had it. The reason that we could not do that was that it still languished in a cataloguing backlog. As I assume you all know, the privilege to receive free copies of items under legal deposit belongs to six libraries.* They are the British Library and the two national libraries of Wales and of Scotland, the university libraries of Oxford and Cambridge and, finally, a quirk of history: Trinity College, Dublin. The British Library aims to take in everything that is required to be deposited and the other five libraries select to a greater or a lesser degree. When the British Library was founded in 1973 it brought into the national library the creation of the national bibliography and therefore the description of material received on deposit. Despite all predictions of the computer industry that the book is dead, the number of publications each year has risen and risen. There have been years when a plateau has been reached but the number has subsequently moved up again. Between 1998/99 and 1999/2000 the increase was 13%. Under these kinds of pressure, the copyright libraries have increasingly co-operated in the cataloguing of the material. This is a trend that is set to continue and expand. I shall return to it in a moment. We currently have no right to the legal deposit of material that is published not on paper but on CD-ROM or online. The government agency to which we report, the Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS), is very sympathetic and last summer was drafting legislation. However, the measure was not announced in the Queens speech, the legislative programme for the next session of Parliament, and we shall have now to wait for the outcome of the general election. In the mean time we have a system of voluntary deposit for hand-held electronic material which came into being on January 1^st 2000. In the first year of its existence it led to the deposit of 600 items from 149 different publishers. This is not much but it is better than nothing and at least gives us practical experience of handling this material and understanding the resources required to do so. The online environment remains a huge challenge for us and sets a different kind of agenda that perhaps impacts on the practices for print. Let me reflect on this for a brief moment. The principle underlying deposit is that a nation should endeavour to preserve a complete record of its intellectual output in any given period for the benefit of future generations. However, putting aside the complexity of deciding, in this new environment, What is a national publication? we are conscious that we shall find it almost impossible to harvest the intellectual output that finds its expression on the Web. For the first time we shall have to be selective. But there is an attraction to taking everything. There are no staff costs associated with doing so. There may be additional on-going costs of having taken in more material but, in the national library context, they are justified by national need. Thus we face very considerable costs right at the point of selection that we are not currently paying to build the print archive. More fundamentally, though, we shall select for the first time when we have previously sought to be all-embracing. We believe this to be so fundamental a shift, having long-term consequences for the view of intellectual progress, that we shall go out to national consultation later this month. Confronting this electronic issue has implications, it seems to me, for how one views the current position with regard to print publications. The two have come to be linked whether we, as the national library, like it or not. Clear signals have been given by Government that we will not secure the legal deposit of electronic material without taking a much harder look at the practices that currently operate. From the publishers perspective this relates to the need to deposit six copies. From the libraries perspective this relates to the need to be much clearer about efficiencies across the UK library economy as a whole. The determination to collaborate has been an increasing trend for libraries because of declining budgets. Thus, as I mentioned earlier, the legal deposit libraries have for many years collaborated over the cataloguing of the intake. We have also collaborated (both nationally and internationally) over what we decide to microfilm. This co-operation, in the English-speaking world has been exemplified by model contracts for commercial filming and in registers of microfilm master negatives. EROMM, maintained at Göttingen University, and fed by libraries throughout Europe is a good example of international co-operation. It assumes that there is no point in microfilming a text for preservation purposes more than once. If we are informed about what others have filmed we can spend our scarce resources wisely on items that no-one has previously filmed and thereby cover more. However, in addition to this, Government, in pursuit of an agenda that makes collections accessible for the many, not the few, and a drive to make all citizens much more computer-literate, has recognised the power of the library system to facilitate their agenda. They are funding networks and digitisation with tens of millions of pounds but they also bring to libraries a single, central view that sees the whole much more clearly than the constituent parts. The single view, when pressed for more university library buildings, raises questions about the need to hold (long-term) more than one copy of any item. Now that we all hold computer catalogues and we, and our users, can see what others hold, the justification of unwitting duplication is no longer sustainable. It may well be that there is a need to keep in duplicate some key texts on the basis of use by scholars but it is not immediately obvious why so much of the print archive should be kept in multiple copies. This is currently driving libraries in my country to consider the issue of long-term storage. Most university libraries retain back-runs of scientific periodicals. Many of the libraries have also taken out subscriptions to JSTOR so as to have those journals in electronic form for the convenience of their users. Very few, as far as I am aware, have followed the economic model proposed by JSTOR and disposed of their print-runs to save space (and therefore money) to off-set the cost of their subscriptions. This progress also embraces disposal. The same motivation, driven by better communication and the availability of catalogues online makes the disposal of material something that we increasingly believe could be better co-ordinated. We are encouraged in this belief by having already, in embryo, an example of co-operative disposal. It is called Booknet (about to be relaunched as a Web service and renamed BookTrove http://www.bl.uk/services/booknet/ ). Booknet is a service that the Library runs largely on behalf of the public library sector. One might argue that it represents the responsible way in which libraries can dispose of material. Booknet collects material from libraries and checks it to see if we require a copy ourselves for the national collection. If we do, the item is added to BL stock. Material that is not wanted is briefly catalogued and sent out to libraries to see if the items can be placed for a nominal sum (which is set to cover the cost of the work involved). In future we shall offer the lists on the Web and save the cost of printing and distribution. It will also widen considerably the number of people and organisations that can benefit from the service. Already, as we begin formally to co-operate over collection development we are having to extend those agreements to cover access, preservation and, ultimately, retention. The last is relevant because a university, for instance, in becoming the national centre for a particular subject is assuming a national role with respect to the material that it collects. Its first responsibility, obviously, is to the research community it serves. However, if that research role makes it admirably placed to assume a national role it seems logical to assume that the nature of the collection under its care also changes. As you might imagine, these are very difficult issues that touch upon the very autonomy of the universities and will need to be discussed at length. However, we have recently created the body to open up and resolve such matters. The three national libraries, together with the Higher Education Funding Council have agreed to form a strategic advisory group on research libraries. For the first time we shall have a body which not only takes a view of research library provision, nationally but also has financial control with which to encourage libraries to co-operate with its strategy. This looks set fair to make significant change in the picture regarding disposals where it is increasingly possible that libraries will no longer take these decisions in isolation but will seek to fit with the requirements of the nation. Thus the British Library policy for disposals stands at a cross roads. We currently maintain the policy that I set out at the beginning of this talk but we anticipate that it will soon modify to adopt at least a nation-wide vision. And, who knows, given that we already have a European perspective with regard to microfilming, perhaps we will develop a European vision with regard to disposals. haut de page
	28/06/2001