LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SCIENCE ABSTRACTS: A BRIEF PROGRESS REPORT Available to Purchase

During 1968 Aslib and the Library Association agreed to collaborate in the production of a new abstracts service, starting in 1969, to cover their combined areas of interest. Two issues of Library and Information Science Abstracts have now appeared and though this brief note of progress may appear somewhat premature it is the intention of the LISA editor and his Advisory Committee to maintain a critical watch on the performance of LISA. Such an attitude is a proper continuation of two reports which examined abstracting services in documentation and library science, and Library Science Abstracts in particular, and which laid the foundation for LISA. A full account of the events leading to the publication of LISA, including attempts to collaborate with Referativnyi Zhurnal and Documentation Abstracts (renamed Information Science Abstracts in the March 1969 issue), appeared earlier this year. The initial intention behind the analysis of only two issues of LISA was to provide a comparison with various figures of throughput predicted during planning. A good correspondence was found; for example, the predicted total for 1969 of 2,489 abstracts is only slightly higher than the figure of 2,379 extrapolated from the first two issues. However, users of the service will be interested in actual performance rather than predictions.