Search

Two hundred and five Soviet higher educational establishments in the humanities, out of a total of 306, issued their scholarly works in separate publications last year. These included 37 universities, 134 pedagogical institutes, 18 economics institutes, and 4 law institutes. They brought out a total of 1,129 titles in 1957, including 258 titles on problems of history, 214 on philology, 161 on law, 126 on political economy and different branches of the national economy, 82 on philosophy, 48 on pedagogics, 21 on journalism, 21 on finance, 7 on the arts (fine arts, theatre, and cinema), 6 on bibliology, and 3 on archival studies. Moreover, there were 182 titles on the humanities in general (transactions of different departments published in the form of scholarly notes of individual institutes). These publications include 215 lectures, 188 school manuals, 9 textbooks, 20 collections of student papers, and 96 popular science pamphlets. The higher schools also brought out 411 volumes of scientific notes, 96 collections of scientific articles, 76 monographs, 16 issues of scientific magazines, 5 bibliographical annotations, and 4 collections of postgraduate papers.

that under the Hoover Commission a study of paperwork management in the Federal Government, 1947-49, pointed up the need for greater control over the generation, storage, and disposal of records. The report on this study also contained recommendations to establish and maintain the needed controls. A second report was made in 1955, based on a survey broader in scope than the first, and it again contained recommendations designed to overcome the faults revealed. In the room left for improvement, however, we could easily test-flight our moon shots. In today's situation we find ourselves with archivists and records managers. I suppose that an archivist is a records manager who has specialized or that a records manager is an archivist who has become a general practitioner. Whatever the difference is, there is need for a closer relationship between the two, for today records managers are accumulating Federal records scheduled for permanent retention at the rate of 200,000 cubic feet a year. Add this annual increase to the 5.7 million cubic feet of records already scheduled for permanent or indefinite retention and the archivist, the final custodian of this flood of paper, will find himself in a sea of records with a poorly charted course. The vision of the archivist, who can foresee what records will be required 50 to 200 years from now, should be used now to prevent the current practice of designating vast records holdings as permanent. Of the 24.5 million cubic feet of Federal records, 24 percent are designated for indefinite or permanent retention. As Wernher Von Braun said, "We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming. " There is, however, one happy note in the accumulation of records. In the past 10 years total Federal records holdings have been reduced by a million cubic feet.

This paper describes the rationale, progress, and prospects of a growing movement within the social sciences: the establishment of repositories of social science data. Social science data archives have developed in recent years because of the increasing need of many social scientists to have access to the growing body of quantitative data (1, 9, 11, 15) produced by research organizations all over the world. The word "archive" and such phrases as "data bank" or "data repository" have come to be applied to organizations developed to serve such d(emands, probably because they were naively viewed in the beginning simply as warehouses of information that should be preserved. However, data archives in the modern mode are viable only because computers provide e ultimately inexpensive and powerful means for processing, storing, maintaining, and analyzing large amounts of data. It is reasonably well known, in turn, that computers are technically intricate mechanisms requiring special human skills to exploit them effectively, and to maintain currency with the rapid changes that have characterized their use. Inasmuch as they depend on computers, data archives necessarily must become, complex organizations, with staffs that include specialists in computer operations, programming, and data processing techniques, as well as administrators and professional research personnel.