[PREAMBLE. Latest information of temporary or permanent value may be published also in pamphlet or paperback form and distributed to subscribers of a service as part of the subscription. Such publications are keyed to a section of a service or several services of a publisher and are easily identifiable as belonging to a service (they carry also the title of the service and the numbering of a section of the service, usually a supplementary bulletin, to which is added a further distinguishing characteristic such as the words "Extra," "Section 2, " etc., "Bulletin 35, Extra," "Report bulletin 24. Volume LIII (Section 2"). Although such materials are often indexed in the service they are unsuitable for filing into the service.

If such a publication is considered of permanent value and is selected for cataloging, the Library of Congress catalogs and classifies it separately from its parent looseleaf service. As such a publication may be issued as an auxiliary to several looseleaf services of a publisher (20), no note showing the relationship to a looseleaf service or services is given on the bibliographic record for it.

Because these publications include the title of the parent looseleaf publication(s) and its section, and contain a numbering system as described above, they have the outward appearance of being part of a monographic series. To insure uniform treatment of all such publications, the Library of Congress prepares a "series-like phrase" authority record for each, which states that the publications are not part of a series. In addition, to facilitate the processing of any future publications with similar identifier, a note is added to the authority record giving instructions for handling the material. An example of such a heading and note follows:

Heading for series-like phrase authority record Example

Note:

"A separately numbered section of the looseleaf service ‘Tax ideas.’ Bulletins issued in looseleaf format are filed as a section of the parent looseleaf. Material published in pamphlet or paperback form issued as a component part of the section, the numbering of which on the pamphlet or paperback is further distinguished by the designation ‘Section 2,’ if selected for cataloging, is classified separately in LC. In cataloging these, omit any reference of relationship to the parent looseleaf; do not give an added entry for the parent looseleaf."]

Catalog a pamphlet or a paperback constituting part of a looseleaf service subscription as a separate independent entity from the parent looseleaf. Do not show its relationship in a note, do not give an added entry for the parent looseleaf service.

Alternately, libraries seeking options other than the one chosen by the Library of Congress, will do well in considering the several options outlined by Mr. Nicholas Triffin in Law Library Journal, b. 76, no.1 (winter 1983), the main portion of which is given, with the author’s permission, below:

"There are probably as many answers to [the question of how to maintain bibliographic control over the various extra and special edition pamphlets that accompany looseleaf services] as there are librarians; so the ones given here should be taken as indicative of the possibilities available, but not as an exhaustive treatise on the subject. The simplest answer, requiring the least discretionary decision making, would probably be to keep all the pamphlets bound together by number and shelved with the "parent" looseleaf. Although this solution requires little thought, it does risk cluttering your library with messy pamphlets, many of which would probably be of little value to your patrons. An equally simple answer, and one favored by some experts on looseleaf services, is to discard all the paper pamphlets after six months. This is, admittedly, rather drastic. Most of the special pamphlets sent with the looseleaf services can be divided into two groups: those that are advance prints of permanent or more authoritative form, and those that contain either esoteric materials that would be difficult to find in a standard small law library (such as the report of a special commission to study securities laws) or editorial materials produced by the publisher (such as the explanation of a recent tax act).

"Materials that belong in the first set I would not catalog at all. I would, however, keep them at least temporarily with the looseleaf set they came with. You could do this in a number of different ways: You could set up a Princeton file after each looseleaf set and keep pamphlets there. You could put a classification number corresponding to the looseleaf set on the pamphlets and just keep them loosely on the shelf. Or you could punch holes in them and bind them together with laces or string so that they don’t get too messy. Whatever procedure you use, you probably don’t want it to be expensive or permanent because the materials themselves have been determined to be nonpermanent. In fact, you probably should weed through them periodically to remove pamphlets for which the more permanent or authoritative substitutes have been received.

"Materials in the second set present a somewhat greater problem because, although they do not contain material that will be duplicated by other publications, some of the materials in the second set will nevertheless have only evanescent appeal. For instance, the exhaustive explanations that came out at the time of the 1969 Tax Reform Act, though unique to their publishers, are now relatively rarely consulted. When developing a program for the materials in the second category, you must try to determine what they will be consulted for and how they will be found. If they are likely to be consulted primarily to elucidate materials in the looseleaf set, or if they are indexed or referred to in the looseleaf set, you may want to keep them with the set.

"If, on the other hand, they have value independently of the looseleaf set they came with, or if they are virtually inaccessible through the set, you will want to make alternative arrangements for finding and, perhaps, storing the materials. In this case you would most likely turn to cataloging the materials, which would be virtually the only way to make them accessible. Having cataloged them, you still have a choice in classifying them. You may either assign every pamphlet a separate classification number and shelve each in its own place on the shelf, or you may collect all the pamphlets for each looseleaf into a binder and classify the binder, or you can collect and bind together all the pamphlets on a particular subject--regardless of the looseleaf sets the pamphlets are associated with--and classify the collection by subject.

"To conclude, the question of pamphlet and looseleaf weeding is one that often comes up and has been discussed before in AALL programs and in prior Questions and Answers columns. In particular, Stanley K. Pearce, librarian at O’Melveny & Myers, has suggested that no pamphlet should be kept unless it is descriptively and subject cataloged. He argued that the benefit of this policy, in addition to ensuring that materials are easily found, is that every decision to retain a pamphlet is necessarily given careful scrutiny since it will entail considerable work down the line."

See also:

11C. Note Area