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Collections Overviews - Science and Technology

Mathematics and Computer Sciences

Scope

This overview focuses on the Library of Congress holdings in pure and applied mathematics and computer science. The Library of Congress classification schedule for mathematics encompasses the call number range QA1 through QA939. This includes mathematical logic, elementary mathematics, algebra, probabilities, mathematical statistics, numerical analysis, geometry, and analytic mechanics. A major subset, QA75.5 through QA76.9 for computer science, contains works which deal with the general theory and application of computers as well as works on modern electronic computers first developed after 1945. Other works relating to computer technology are classified under TK5101 through TK5105.9, which encompasses telecommunications technology (including networks); and TK7885 through TK7895, which includes works on the design of computer hardware and circuitry as well as hardware and electronics. The subject matter of applied mathematics, more broadly defined to include applications in everything from economics and linguistics, to music and architecture, is not discussed here.

Size

The Library has over 91,000 serial and monograph titles in mathematics, of which 24,500 relate to computer science. Over 4,400 additional titles cover engineering-related materials. In terms of size alone, the mathematics and computer science monograph and serial collections together surpass that of any other library in the country.

General Research Strengths

The major strength of the Library's mathematics and computer sciences collections lies in its breadth and depth in both foreign and English language materials, and in its current collecting intensity primarily at the research or instructional support level.

The importance of serial literature cannot be overemphasized in these fields. In mathematics particularly, a significant number of publications necessary for research come from the Soviet Union, Japan, Europe, and developing countries. Our exchange and overseas acquisition programs and in-house research projects have facilitated a steady influx of important titles, as well as the more obscure, resulting in a large number of foreign journal runs. Many of the cover-to-cover translations that are prohibitively expensive to many academic libraries are acquired through copyright deposit. In addition, over half a million translations of scientific articles are available on site through the National Translations Center. A RLG Verification Study in Mathematical Journals, conducted in 1985, ranked the Library of Congress sixth overall among 22 institutions, in collecting basic, research, and historical journals. The Library was ranked second to Brown University for its historical collection.

Mathematics literature retains its research value for a long time, and thus retrospective holdings are important.The Library has roughly 90 percent of the publications of the three major professional associations in the field of computer science: the Association for Computing Machinery which has a mathematical or theoretical orientation, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mechanics which has an engineering or applications orientation, and the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Mathematics has always been a Russian specialty, and Russian mathematicians are considered to be among the best in the world. The Library's Reading Rooms, in an effort to improve on currency and access not only to bibliographic citations but also to full text, has made available CD-ROMS, several of which are of great interest to the mathematics and computer science researcher. These include Computer Select, UMI Dissertation Abstracts, ERIC, INSPEC, NTIS, and IEEE Full Text.

Areas of Distinction

The history of computers and computing (or more correctly, data processing), the Library has a significant rare book collection as well as the papers of two giants in the field, Herman Hollerith and John von Neumann. These collections are complemented by several seminal papers in the field of information theory that were first published in technical report form and are therefore part of the Library's collections.

The Library has acquired important first editions of famous mathematicians and other landmark books in the field of mathematics. Amongst the notable acquisitions are a first printed edition of Euclid's Elements, a work which has seen over one thousand editions. Archimedes' writings are represented in the Library's collection by a 1544 collection Opera, quae quidem extant, omnia, the first complete edition of his work. The Library has a 1561 edition of the most influential English textbook of the sixteenth century, an arithmetic by Robert Recorde entitled The Grounde of Artes. The Rare Book Division is rich with other important works of mathematicians including Napier, Fermat, Descartes, Newton, and Euler, to name just a few.

Other strong areas are the collected works of mathematicians, arithmetics, of which several date as far back as 1492 and the 1500s, lecture notes series, and the publications of major mathematical societies from their inception to date. In both mathematics and computer science the Library has a strong collection of English language textbooks acquired through copyright deposit. In addition, the Manuscript Division houses the papers of mathematicians William Horace Craigue, Edward Hayes, and Oswald Veblen. The Microform Reading Room services the ERIC reports (as does the Science Reading Room) documenting teaching in mathematics and computer-assisted learning.

Weaknesses/Exclusions

Technical reports from large and small university departments and from industrial research and development laboratories such as IBM and AT&T are of extreme importance in the area of computer science, often more so than traditional published literature (which is frequently out-of-date by the time it reaches print). The Library of Congress does not collect these reports unless they are published through the National Technical Information Service. In contrast Stanford University has over 28,000 technical reports for the computer sciences in its collections and provides a computerized index of these items. Computer science researchers are primarily interested in recent reports, although older ones, particularly those with an emphasis on theory, are sometimes requested. Established researchers generally obtain recently published and unpublished reports directly from the authors, and university computer science departments often maintain exchange programs for this purpose.

Through the years the Library has lost many of its computer science materials to theft. While these materials have recently been secured in locked cages, many titles are still unavailable to the public because they are needed by, and assigned to, staff at the work site. In mathematics, preprints are the most important medium for consultation among scholars, for sharing information, and for avoiding duplication. Unfortunately the Library of Congress has made a decision not to collect preprints, and there are few exceptions to this policy.

With the advent of the Internet and bulletin board systems, many conferences and papers are being published in electronic format only. There is currently no means available to monitor and/or capture this information, and much of it is being lost to posterity. Over the years there has been increasing pressure to cancel serial subscriptions as acquisition funds have dwindled. In spite of the fairly high overall ranking in the mathematics verification study, there are still approximately 30 percent of the core research journals indexed in Mathematical Reviews which the Library either doesn't have at all, or which have been discontinued or have serious gaps in holdings.

Although the holdings of Japanese mathematical journals published both in English and the vernacular are outstanding, they are limited to those published by societies and academia, and received on exchange. Funds are very limited for commercial publications.