LLEI D'ART 11

Las colecciones de la bibliotecas que atienden a todo tipo de usuarios, es decir, las nacionales, públicas y centrales universitarias, están formadas por manuscritos, dibujos, materiales impresos (libros, revistas, grabados, mapas, partituras, etc.), audiovisuales (discos, CDROM, DVD, películas…) y objetos digitales en soporte físico o accesibles en línea. En las bibliotecas especializadas, predominarán aquellos tipos de documentos más adecuados a la naturaleza de la información de cada ámbito del saber. En las disciplinas científicas y técnicas, por ejemplo, prevalecen los artículos de revistas, los informes y las actas de congresos. Este hecho obliga a que los centros de documentación describan los contenidos de cada número de publicación periódica y comunicaciones presentadas a un seminario, editadas en línea o en papel, o se suscriban a bases de datos que las referencien. Así se evita una duplicidad de trabajos y un aprovechamiento inadecuado de recursos. La primera actividad, que se debe actualizar de forma regular, es la planificación de la biblioteca. Esta acción incluye el análisis de las necesidades informativas de los usuarios potenciales y de las bibliotecas existentes en el territorio o en el área del conocimiento con vistas a establecer programas cooperativos. Comprende también una declaración del objetivo del centro, los procesos y servicios que se van a prestar, una enumeración de todos los recursos necesarios y del espacio preciso para albergar al personal, las colecciones, los servicios y la tecnología. and safety, data protection and intellectual property. Librarians will also require training in IT and telecommunications at user level to be able to use office IT applications and any others necessary for information handling, library service providers, and digitalization and preservation of electronic documents. Those in charge of the digitalization of technical services should be able to structure data and carry out organic and functional analyses. Librarians who work in historical centres with manuscripts, incunabula and ancient printed material need training in paleography and in the creation and description of manually printed publications. An important part of the latter is the object of the material bibliography. They also require education in those languages used for knowledge transmission in the past i.e. Greek and Latin. All library professionals should know how modern textual and audiovisual bibliographic material is produced, distributed and conserved, as well as the so-called ‘digital objects’. This will allow the creation of more precise descriptions using the specific input of each of the agents involved in content writing and in the material creation of the publication. In addition, more appropriate measures can be taken to store, preserve and conserve the aforementioned material. It is equally important that librarians be educated in both culture and the history of science and technology, as both are essential for the tasks of identification, selection and evaluation of all kinds of publications, including digital objects, using descriptors and notations of bibliographic classifications, thus facilitating access to material by subject or area. They are also required to understand user requests and to create information search strategies for bibliographic databases in virtual libraries, so that the person interested may access the relevant material. In the case of specialized libraries of documentation centres such as those in university faculties, ideally the librarian should have a degree in the corresponding knowledge area. Although nowadays anyone with a university degree can be a librarian, the pay and/or the lack of specific knowledge dissuade scientific, technical or social studies graduates from working in this area. Although much progress has been made, there is still much work left to be done to obtain an improved salary for librarians, as well as in organizing LIS masters’ programmes in specific disciplines. Library collections that are aimed at a general user profile i.e. national, public and central university libraries are usually composed of manuscripts, drawings, printed material (books, magazines, engravings, maps, scores, etc.), audio-visual material (discs, CD-ROMs, DVDs, films and so on) and digital objects in a physical medium or accessible on-line. Specialized libraries tend to have documents more closely-related to the type of information in each area. In technical and scientific disciplines for example, there is a greater focus on journal articles, reports and conference proceedings. This fact means that documentation centres provide periodical publications content and papers presented at seminars, published either on-line or on paper, and subscribe to databases that reference them. This avoids repeating work and makes better use of resources. Melvil Dewey (1851 – 1931). Bibliotecario estadounidense, creador del Sistema Dewey de clasificación bibliográfica/ He was an American librarian and educator, inventor of the Dewey Decimal system of library classification . 70