University of Virginia Library

VI

Latterly the coverage of IBZ has declined from about 13,000 periodicals (Tanselle, p. 171) to 8105 (pars 2 of 1977), a few of which are in fact Festschriften or other works of composite authorship, such as Studies in the book trade in honour of Graham Pollard and Essays in the history of publishing in celebration of the 250th anniversary of the house of Longman, 1724-1974. There are some qualifications to be made to Tanselle's list,[4] but the important thing to observe is that despite the general reduction even more bibliographical periodicals have been added in the past few years, including Bibliotheck, American Book Collector and Scholarly Publishing. Most importantly for the purposes of comparison, since pars 2 of 1974 PBSA has also been indexed.

It is difficult to understand the objectives of IBZ, largely because it contains no policy statement. Though all fields of knowledge are supposed to be within its scope, in fact most medical periodicals were recently dropped, since the indexing of medical literature was already covered by specialized indexes.[5] Nor is there any statement about the basis for selecting items for indexing: the subtitle of IBZ ('covering all fields of knowledge') suggests that there is no basis in subject matter, and an innocent user might infer from the 'List of periodicals indexed' that those periodicals are fully indexed. But if bibliography is typical, in fact the indexing is highly selective: as the Summary Table shows, only a third of the articles from BC, Library, PBSA and SB of 1974 were indexed, and practically nothing from the notes etc. The selection of items simply defies explanation, at least as far as the outsider is concerned.

The unpredictability of IBZ can be observed from a few comparisons:

IBZ differs from ABHB, MLA and MHRA in that it does not index the publications of a particular time-span: each pars, which appears half-yearly, apparently includes whatever entries have been received from the copyists scattered throughout Germany. Broadwin's description of the indexing process is instructive: not only is the transcribing of entries done outside the editorial office, but the assignment of subject headings is done from the titles alone, and 'should a title prove to be totally nondescriptive or insufficient information be found in the reference works to determine exactly the subject matter of an article, it is temporarily laid aside.'

The decentralisation of effort and what appears to be a casualness of attitude help to explain the characteristics of IBZ. First, there can be no guarantee that the indexed items from any one issue of a periodical will appear in the same pars, or that issues of a periodical will be indexed in the order that they were published:

Then there is the nature of the subject headings, which are very general unless a proper name is appropriate.

Lack of subject limitation, combined with unpredictability in selection, means that several items from BC and Library not indexed by ABHB, MLA or MHRA are in fact indexed by IBZ:

(The item from BC is also indexed by BHI; the article and note from the belated part 4 of Library are also indexed by LL.)

IBZ may index articles of bibliographical interest published in unlikely host periodicals, but its erratic treatment of known material puts it completely out of contention as a competitor with ABHB, MLA and MHRA.