Strengthening the United States-Japan Library Partnership in the Global Information Flow 4th

The 72 participants at the Fourth US-Japan conference on libraries and information science in higher education, held in October 1988 in Racine, Wisconsin, contributed to a lively state-of-the-art assessment of academic librarianship in both countries. The proceedings of the conference reflect the current concerns in Japan and the US for the need to share bibliographic data more effectively, and in particular to provide ready access to each other's Chinese-Japanese-Korean character codes. Conservation and preservation of library materials continue to generate interest on both sides of the Pacific. Also explored are major concerns by Americans for continued collecting of Japanese materials to enrich and maintain the holdings started decades ago, when the value of the US dollar was less constrained in its ability to purchase foreign language texts. Databases and networks, and copyright issues related to them, continue to have a strong play at this bi-national gathering as topics which deal with the knowledge interdependence of the two leaders of the free world economy, with the global importance of scholarly and high tech information growing at dramatic rates. This volume contains the prepared speeches, in both their English and Japanese texts. ""Strengthening the US-Japan Library Partnership in Global Information Flow"" is not only a unique overview of the state of academic librarianship in the 1980s, but a valuable historical document on the history of co-operation between the US and Japan.