It is difficult to separate and detail the support provided for the various programs in the brain sciences, i.e.: Cognitive & Linguistic Sciences, Neuroscience, Psychology, and Computer Science. Of these, Computer Science can more easily be separated from the others, but the first three so overlap in their interests that there is barely anything supporting one that does not support the other two. As these programs have grown at Brown, so has Library support for them. We do not track expenditures for Neuroscience separately from those for the rest of Biology. If we assume that they amount to a quarter of those expenditures, and add them to the expenditures for Cognitive & Linguistic Sciences and for Psychology, we have a total of $168,746 in expenditures for the three programs in fiscal 1997/98.
The name of the Department of Cognitive & Linguistic Sciences does indicate the different paths of research and teaching. There is a continuing interest in the traditional linguistic subjects such as phonetics and semantics. Meanwhile, the number of cognitive sciences topics includes such areas as visual perception and neural models of cognition. Also, the two disciplines expressly overlap in areas such as psycholinguistics or language and cognition.
The varied approaches that members of the department take also imply a reliance on other disciplines beyond Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences. Therefore psychology, neuroscience, computer science, applied mathematics, philosophy, and anthropology all have roles. The collections that the Library has in those subjects contribute to the support of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences. Because of the multidisciplinary nature of the research and teaching, the following numbers are not fully indicative of the resources used by Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences faculty and students.
The table below outlines Library expenditures in Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences:
LIBRARY SUPPORT 1995/96 1996/97 1997/98 Firm Orders $1,750 $1,900 $2,294 Approval Plan 6,044 4,869 4,880 Serials 20,780 20,670 22,030 TOTAL SUPPORT $ 28,574 $27,439 $29,204 Current serials received on behalf of this program are 110 titles. We have not established just which parts of the Library of Congress Classification support this program, outside of the portion of the "P" classification devoted to linguistics. The Library holds some 5000 titles in this class, but this markedly understates the actual number of titles supporting Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences. One would also need to count significant portions of the BF, Q, QA, and perhaps QP classes. The Library should work with the faculty to determine just which portions these are.
The main electronic bibliographic tool for topics within cognitive and linguistic sciences is PsycLIT. It contains records for the articles within over 1300 journals. PsycBOOKS has book and book chapter information back to 1987.
The Library is attempting to gain electronic access to the full text of electronic journals as they become available and financial terms permit. The proposed Brain Science Program should make a big impact on Cognitive Science. This would enable the Library to fill in journals that have been requested by faculty for subscription and those that have been often obtained via interlibrary loan. Often the journals in the fields of Cognitive Sciences and Linguistics are not as expensive as in the biological sciences. The journal, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processing, is an exception at around $850. Here are some of the titles requested by faculty.
Artificial Life
Group Processes and Intergroup Relations
Journal of Behavioral Decision Making
Journal of Computational Neuroscience
Journal of Consciousness Studies
Learning and Memory
Machine Translation
Memory
Natural Language Semantics
Neural Computing and Applications
Thinking and ReasoningNew research subjects demand support. The more traditional areas of linguistics do not get the share of the budget that they used to. In a response to a survey of faculty interests, one professor filled in "weaknesses" of the collection this way: "little on African Languages/Linguistics; weak on Theoretical Linguistics; so-so on Language Acquisition and Language Learning Disorders." The funds for Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences more and more are directed to subjects in common with psychology, neuroscience, and neural networks, and it would seem to make sense for the Library to treat these programs as one. We must be sure, however, not to fail to support the more traditional linguistics teaching and research.
Frank Kellerman, Sciences Librarian
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