Introduction

The 6th edition of the World directory of national parliamentary libraries contains 191 sovereign states, the supra-national European Union and another three regional communities in Latin America with parliaments. The sum total of parliaments or, in the case of bi- or tricameral parliaments, chambers listed is 258 (1). Eight of the 191 countries in this directory have no parliaments (as of May 1996), viz. Afghanistan, Brunei Darussalam, Gambia, Myanmar, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia, and the Vatican City State2). In two of these, i.e. in Gambia and in Niger, the parliaments have been dissolved since the publication of the 5th edition of the World directory of national parliamentary libraries, and their entries had to be removed accordingly. The fate of the Liberian Transitional Legislative Assembly is uncertain at this moment, the last telephone contact with the Chief Clerk, Daniel Lincoln Bloh II, whom since his attachment to the German Bundestag in 1988 the editor knows well, having been in February 1996.

On the other hand the parliaments of sixteen countries are represented with a comprehensive entry either for the first time ever, or again after an interruption of some years, viz. apart from Palau which became independent on 1 October 1994, Antigua & Barbuda, Burundi, Cambodia, the People's Republic of China, Guatemala, Honduras, Kuwait, Sao Tomé & Príncipe, Sierra Leone, Syria, Tajikistan, Togo, Uganda, Yugoslavia, and Zaire.

The report year for the 6th edition is 1995. The data have been collected by means of questionnaires (3) approved by the Section of Parliamentary Libraries of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) at the General Conference in Havana and distributed in the last quarter of 1994, with reminders being filed in the third quarter and at the end of 1995. The first country to report was Belize in November 1994 and the last one Yugoslavia in May 1996. For reasons of authentication the date when the questionnaire was returned is recorded at the end of each entry. In most cases this has been either in the last quarter of 1995 or between January and May 1996. Sometimes the editor was given to understand by a parliament that, as there was nothing to update, the entry of the 5th edition remained valid. There was no reaction at all from only twelve parliaments or chambers (4). The positive response rate of 95 % is certainly an indication of the spirit of cooperation which prevails among parliaments, and which is a distinctive characteristics of the international Section of Parliamentary Libraries, too.

The World directory of national parliamentary libraries serves three purposes. It is, first, a quick-reference book of parliaments, enlisting in an outline format using numerical labels to identify information fields (5), their basic data, e.g. the name of the parliament in the original language, the number of deputies, the address including - very important for all kinds of communication - e-mail, telephone, telex, and fax numbers, the name and official title of the Secretary General (6), and, possibly, also the name of another contact person (label 1.2.2), if there is no parliamentary librarian (label 3.2). As there are two prominent voluntary associations of parliaments, the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) with headquarters in Geneva and the Association of Secretaries General of Parliaments (ASGP), the individual entries indicate in a standard form whether a parliament or chamber is a member of the IPU and whether its Secretary General is a member of the ASGP (7). As the World directory of national parliamentary libraries is an authorized IFLA publication, it goes without saying that IFLA memberships are stated as well (label 3.11). It must be mentioned with regret, however, that compared with the IPU and the ASGP the IFLA membership rate is still somewhat low.

The second purpose the World directory of national parliamentary libraries is to serve as a library directory presenting a number of detailed informations on parliamentary libraries, documentation and information services. Apart from special informational services these are the usual library holdings and expenditure data, information on subject cataloguing and automation, the number of staff and the name of the Parliamentary Librarian, the terms of reference, and bibliographic citations of publications concerning or by the library (8).

Finally, the World directory of national parliamentary libraries intends to be an annotated bibliography of the official parliamentary documents, i.e. the verbatim reports of parliamentary sittings and debates, the printed papers and reports, standing orders, lists of Members (9), and parliamentary handbooks. As many political issues are global ones today, it is important for every parliament to know the official publications of other parliaments in the world in order to be able to consult these if there is a need for it.

The 6th edition of the World directory of national parliamentary libraries contains 181 parliamentary libraries, much less than the 258 parliaments or chambers listed, the reason being that there are some parliaments which don't have a library or any similar agency officially charged with providing information to the parliament (labels 1.2 and 1.2.1), and that in the case of bi- or tricameral parliaments resource sharing prevails, i.e. the chambers are serviced by a common parliamentary library.

Parliamentary librarianship is in essence a specific kind of information work. It is the information provided to the parliamentarians or, indeed, to all who are nowadays involved in political decision making at the parliamentary level (10), that really counts, and as long as the parliamentary library performs well in this respect it is a matter of secondary concern to the parliament whether the information resources are acquired by, and stored in, a parliamentary library of its own, or whether it relies on outside sources. As concerns the detailed information on parliamentary libraries the World directory of national parliamentary libraries, therefore, very much concentrates on typical informational services to parliamentarians and political decision makers (sections 3.6 and 3.8), e.g. press cutting services, the indexing of periodical articles, current bibliographies and SDI services, radio and TV monitoring, database searches, and even analysis and research (11). As for the latter purpose, some parliamentary libraries employ, in addition to professional librarians, subject analysts as well. The breakdown of the library personnel takes account of this fact identifying the number of professional librarians, analysts, and support and other staff (section 3.3).

Whereas it is comparatively easy to define what parliamentary librarianship means, it is all the more difficult to define what is a parliamentary library. As informational services to parliaments can be organized in many different ways, parliamentary libraries as institutional organisms vary widely, as the individual entries in this directory illustrate. However, according to a rough classificatory scheme the following categories of parliamentary libraries can be distinguished:

parliamentary libraries proper,
hybrid parliamentary libraries,
contractual parliamentary libraries.

Parliamentary libraries proper are in-house libraries provided for by the parliament, and forming an integral part of the overall support services of the parliament. In order to obtain a noticeable impact in terms of reference and information activities, a staff of at least between one and two dozen academic and professional librarians and support personnel is needed. For example, in the Bundestag Library sixteen academic librarians who have graduated in either law, economics or in the physical and social sciences, with an additional two-year training in librarianship, cover a wide range of politically relevant subject fields, scrutinizing current national bibliographies to select new publications for acquisition by the library and perusing the major periodicals of their subject fields for articles to be indexed. The academic librarians are also engaged in subject cataloguing and thesaurus maintenance, and compile special subject bibliographies, too. They are assisted by some sixty non-academic professional librarians with responsibility for the classical library activities of ordering, accessioning, cataloguing, reference, circulation, etc. In addition there is a dozen support staff, e.g. stack attendants, bookbinders, or typists. The Bundestag Library, in addition to the 672 Members, serves other political decision makers as well, the annual number of circulations and reference services being approx. 90.000 each.

The Bundestag Library is an example of parliamentary libraries proper of large states. Smaller nations with fewer parliamentarians and more restricted terms of reference for the library service may need only 20 or 25 % of the resources of the Bundestag Library. But, still, it requires parliaments of some size, in session for the larger part of the year, with considerable financial resources, too, to afford this particular type of a parliamentary library. The parliamentary libraries of Belgium, the Czech Republic, Korea, New Zealand, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Sweden, Thailand, or Turkey may serve as illustrations of efficient parliamentary libraries proper in some of the smaller or less advanced states in the world.

Small countries and less developed nations are certainly in a disadvantage as regards setting up an efficient parliamentary library proper. But they should not acquiesce in the inevitableness of having to confine themselves to a small and necessarily less effective parliamentary library in terms of reference, information, and analysis services. Some parliaments, in an effort of pooling the library resources of their nation economically, have devised noteworthy hybrid forms of a parliamentary library.

While libraries of this category of parliamentary library are still provided for by the parliament and named accordingly, they are, in fact, a combination of two particular types of library, a parliamentary library serving parliamentarians, and a special or general research library serving the public. Because of their dual mandate they can be equipped with sufficient resources in terms of qualified personnel (professional librarians, subject specialists) and finances in order to both maintain the necessary information sources and make an intelligent use of them for the benefit of the parliament.

Illustrations of this type of parliamentary library are the Finnish Library of Parliament which apart from being the parliamentary library is the central research and national resource library for law and political science12) and the Library of the Hungarian Parliament, which combines the functions of the parliamentary library and the central law library of the country (13). In Switzerland the functions of the parliamentary library and the central administrative library of the country are combined in the Eidgenössische Parlaments- und Zentralbibliothek (14).

Another instance of a hybrid parliamentary library is the parliamentary library which also serves as the national library of the country. This concept is particularly appealing to democratic societies - and not necessarily to small ones only! - in so far as the parliament in addition to its constitutional function of representing and integrating the nation as a body politic, also embodies its cultural identity in so far as it is expressed by its publications. The American Library of Congress is the best known instance of this notion, and has set an example to the establishment of parliamentary libraries of this kind of hybrid type in Australia, New Zealand and, after the Second World War, in Japan, too. In Greece the Library of Parliament "functions as a second National Library" (15).

The danger inherent in parliamentary libraries which also serve as national libraries is that the service to the nation at large may superimpose the function of information support service to parliament. Whereas in Australia and New Zealand the functions of parliamentary library and national library thus became separated in the 1960s, the solution which the United States devised with the Legislative Reorganization Acts of 1946 and 1970, was the establishment, within the Library of Congress, of a Congressional Research Service as an exclusively Congressional support service, with its own library of at present 100.000 volumes, 5.000 current periodicals, and more than 700 staff. With the establishment of its Research and Legislative Reference Bureau in 1948, the National Diet Library in Japan followed suit.

The third type of parliamentary library is the contractual parliamentary library. If, for whatever reason, a parliament does not dispose of a parliamentary library, parliamentarians and staff may either individually consult other libraries in the area or, preferably, the parliament as such selects a large neighbouring library - usually, but not necessarily, the national library - assigning the responsibilities of a parliamentary library to it. The individual duties of the contractual library concerning its services to parliament are usually stipulated in its charter.

In the wake of the parliamentarization which followed the disintegration of the former Soviet Union quite a few parliaments in the region with no parliamentary library of their own had to look for effective information support services. Many instances of this variant of a parliamentary library can, therefore, be found in Eastern Europe (16) and Central Asia, but, as Liechtenstein illustrates, it is not confined to this part of the world only. There are common characteristics of how contractual libraries commit themselves to their additional function of parliamentary library. One line of action is the creation of a parliamentary information department, preferably located in the parliament itself, which is responsible for all information services to the parliament, and which is entitled to draw upon the entire - intellectual and material - resources of the national library to ensure the best-possible legislative information support. As a rule the information services offered are bibliographic and documentary in character, but sometimes analytic services are offered as well. As a variant, analytic and research services are supplied by another national research institute. The second major activity of the contractual library consists in maintaining a reading room in the parliament building with a reference collection, periodicals, and newspapers. As an alternative the parliament itself provides for a reading room and a small parliamentary reference library, which is the case in Latvia and Lithuania. In this arrangement basic reference as well as newspaper clipping services are supplied from the parliament's own resources, whereas the more sophisticated library and information services are rendered by the contractual library (17).

Because of the disparateness of parliamentary libraries assembled in this directory, the World directory of national parliamentary libraries cannot be used as a basis for comparative performance measurement of parliamentary libraries, the more so as not all factors which have to be taken into account for such an assessment are included in the entries, e.g. whether a parliamentary library is part of a library network, or whether it can avail of an official backup library, or how much it draws on other national resource libraries (18).

Most of the parliamentary libraries in this directory are the only parliamentary library in their country, but as sovereign powers may not only be divided horizontally, i.e. between the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary, but also vertically, i.e. between different levels of territorial collectivities, each level having its own instruments of exercising power (the levels ranging from member states of federations at the low end to the supra-national level at the high end, with the nation state at the intermediate level) parliaments exist on three levels. The World directory of national parliamentary libraries, which since its 5th edition also includes multi-national parliaments, is complemented by the World directory of parliamentary libraries of federated states and autonomous territories, published in 1993, which lists 398 parliaments or chambers at the sub-national level. In order to inter-connect the two directories, the countries with second-tier parliaments are marked, although the coverage of these parliaments, admittedly, does not reach the 95 % of the 6th edition of the World directory of national parliamentary libraries.

English is the preferred language of both international directories, but the other four IFLA working languages are used as well. Information supplied in Russian, has not been transliterated, but in conformity with the usage of the IPU and the ASGP romanized according to the English transcription. Names and bibliographic citations in other non-Latin scripts have also been transcribed. This has been particulary difficult as regards Arab names and titles of publications, as the transcriptions supplied by Arab parliaments varied according to whether French or English is being used as business language in the individual countries. A harmonization has been attempted based on the questionnaire in Arabic, but if there was evidence for parliaments or persons using a quasi-official transcription of their names in a European language, that transcription, of course, had to be preferred. Some inconsistencies have been inevitable, therefore.

The entries of the World directory of national parliamentary libraries are arranged by political jurisdiction in an alphabetical sequence. Geographical, topographical, and name indexes function as additional access points. The individual states are entered under their customary English name, if there is an established English form of name that may be used. Customary geographical names should not be confused with the official names of states, neither in full form nor in short form. The filing of the entries conforms to the International standard bibliographic filing rules, as defined by ISO/TR 8393, a Technical Report of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

The compilation of such a comprehensive international reference work is always a collective undertaking. The editor, therefore, wants to acknowledge the cooperation of the parliaments listed in this edition and the assistance received from many German embassies abroad and also from some foreign embassies in Bonn, from IFLA Headquarters and from APLA and APLAP as regional associations of parliamentary libraries in Asia and in the Pacific region. In particular, he appreciates the support extended to him by Rosa María Grau of the Spanish Congress of Deputies, Irina Andreeva of the Russian Parliamentary Library, and Bernard Vansteelandt of the Belgian Library of Parliament in translating questionnaires, introductory letters, and reminders into Spanish, Russian, and French, and in interpreting ambiguous informations received in these languages.

In assembling this multi-lingual directory the editor has attempted to exercise diligent care in the preparation of each entry. Nevertheless, errors and mistakes can never be entirely avoided. Therefore, the editor cannot warrant the correctness of every piece of information. Users of this 6th edition of the World directory of national parliamentary libraries are invited to notify the editor of any mistakes or incorrect information.

Dr. Ernst Kohl
Editor

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