Western Europe [antikvár]

Preface With more than one million volumes of books and government documents, some 30,000 periodical and news- paper titles and over 2,500 archival units, the library of the Hoover Institution is considerably larger than that of most universities or colleges. The size of the holdings presents special challenges to the administration and staff of the Institution, as they seek to honor the wish of the founder, former President Herbert Hoover, that the library's materials be "free as the Sierra winds'1 for scholars to interpret as they see fit. A large part of this obligation of providing access to the holdings consists in accurate and thorough description. For faculty, students and staff of Stanford and other Western institutions, and for the more than 1,000 American and foreign visitors who make intensive resident use of the library each year, the main card catalogs in the Hoover Tower and Lou Henry Hoover Buildings fill much of this need for information. To those who must plan their research from a distance, however, and who are unable to make exploratory visits here, the Institution has tried to communicate in other ways. It has encouraged bibliographic studies of its re- sources (see inside back cover). Since 1963 it has produced three triennial reports covering library operations and acquisitions as well as research and publishing activity. Most recently, the Hoover Institution granted to G. K. Hall and Company of Boston permission to reproduce the contents of its entire card catalog in 88 volumes. The seven volumes representing the Japanese Collection were published in the summer of 1970 and the remaining volumes will appear throughout the rest of this year and next. Despite their usefulness, however, the G. K. Hall volumes are—as a complete set—too unwieldy and too costly for all but a few libraries and other institutional purchasers. The need has always existed for information with content and format somewhere between the summaries in the triennial reports and the card-by-card itemizations of the main catalog. To fill this need is the aim of the present series of Hoover Institution collection surveys, comprising separate volumes on Africa and the Middle East, East Asia, Eastern Europe, International and English-Language Collections, Latin America and Western Europe. Some precedent for these reviews was set by such earlier publications as Special Collections in the Hoover Library on War, Revolution and Peace by Nina Almond and H. H. Fisher (1940) and by the series of three country surveys done in the 1950's: The Hoover Library Collection on Russia by Witold S. Sworakowski (1954); The Hoover Library Collection on Germany by Hildegard R. Boeninger (1955); and The Hoover Institution Collection on Japan by Nobutaka Ike (1958). Each of these precursors is now out of print. The new series of surveys will be regional in scope, corresponding to the current divisions of responsibility within the library. The holdings on each region have been compiled and described by the responsible curator. In a recent letter to me, supporting formation of a Hoover Institution-inspired consortium of Western colleges and universities interested in international and area studies, Professor George F. Kennan of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton said of the Institution's library: "The mere existence of any great collection of this nature repre- sents a species of commitment not only to its preservation but to its continued enrichment by appropriate acquisition of current material, without which it would become a fragmentary and dead archive." In the same spirit of emphasis on convenient and productive use of its holdings, the Hoover Institution is pleased to publish these concise yet comprehensive surveys of its collections. They will be updated as the need arises. W. Glenn Campbell, Director Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace September, 1970