International Organizations
Scope
This overview focuses on Library of Congress holdings of material by and about the United Nations, its related agencies and other international intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Organization of American States, the Organization of African Unity, and the European Communities.
The Library is a depository for major UN agencies: the Food and Agriculture Organization, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and UNESCO, as well as the European Communities (EC). It also acquires by exchange/gift full runs of publications from many other agencies. The EC includes the European Economic Community, the European Coal and Steel Community, the European Atomic Energy
Size
Because international agencies deal with a vast array of subjects, works by and about the organizations are scattered throughout the general collections. The Serial and Government Publications Division has some major sets, including UN documentation in hard copy and microform. It has been estimated that the UN proper produces approximately 10,000 printed publications or documents yearly; the size of the overall international collections can be extrapolated from this. As one example, the largest subset of UN materials is the collected set of UN documents classified as JX1977.A2. While LC no longer adds to this set except in microform, this one set extends to more than 500 linear feet. on-microform format.
General Research Strengths
One of LC's strengths is that it is a depository library for many international organizations and receives materials by exchange/gift from all types of organizations. LC is also the sole depository in this country for publications of the World Bank. LC also collects from most other international agencies (except for smaller technical organizations in the agricultural or medical fields). These primary materials are also supported by a vast number of secondary works about the international agencies. The Serial Division's collection of reference works relating to UN agency documents is very substantial.
Areas of Distinction
The fact that the Library collects from all major international intergovernmental agencies as well as many nongovernmental organizations means that the LC collections have great range, breadth and depth. No other library has such large international organization collections. For example, LC has notably strong collections from distant international organizations or subsidiary bodies. While other UN depositories receive documents from one regional commission--for U.S. libraries that is the UN Economic Commission for Europe. LC receives through exchange the other four UN regional commissions and thus has very good collections covering all UN regional documentation. The collection from the Economic Commission for Africa is particularly strong (possibly better than the collection of the UN Dag Hammarskjold Library) because of coverage through LC's Nairobi office.
As an EC Depository Library, the Library regularly receives official publications as they are published. This official collection is supported by the publications of member states and those of cooperative regional organizations.
Weaknesses/Exclusions
LC has never had detailed records (such as a shelflist) of individual UN documents or documents of related agencies, and the Library has never done systematic claiming for missing items. The thousands and thousands of individual UN documents received are not individually cataloged and thus are not under full bibliographic control. Although LC's control is now improved because the Readex CD-ROM UN index covers documents item by item (from 1985 forward), not every piece indexed is on LC's shelves.
Our most serious weakness in European Community material is the lack of indexing sources for EC publications and ways to track EC activities. The SCAD Bibliography, a major index resource of EC publications and documents, is available on CD-ROM but has yet to be acquired by the Library. Also, the Library has not established a telecommunications link with the EC Commission in Brussels to access to several EC databases. Due to language variations of titles published by the EC, access to the collections is often inhibited by the Library's policy of cataloging under the first title, regardless of language, rather than under the English language title.
The Library does not have sufficient staff to accession and file incoming receipts promptly, nor the staff to do systematic claiming. Furthermore, traditional cataloging rules do not work well for large documentary collections. Access to the UN collections and other international agency materials can often be very difficult because of the complexity of the material and the cataloging practices that separate materials. Changes in cataloging treatment over the years have also made retrieval of the materials more problematic.
Although the Library has an excellent collection of League of Nations publictions, use is difficult because the materials are boxed, not shelved, at their remote site at Landover. The microform League collection is a good backup but unfortunately does not contain the full range of League materials removed from Capitol Hill.
