Library On Microfilm

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31249, 22 December 1966, Page 3

Library On Microfilm

(N.Z. Press Association) HAMILTON, Dec. 21. The most comprehensive anthropological reference library in the world, containing hundreds of thousands of pages of detailed information, has arrived at the University of Waikato. And it takes up only a few cubic feet of space in the corner of a room.

It is the only copy outside North America, Western

Europe and Japan, of Yale University’s human relations area file. The file, produced on microfilm, contains, at present, 890,000 pages covering nearly 100 cultures from 1975 sources. The original file at Yale contains about 2.500,000 pages ant 100,000 will be added each year at Waikato until the complete file is compiled. The grant for the file was made to allow Professor J. E. Ritchie, professor of psychology, to continue a research project. Professor Ritchie is particularly interested in relation-

ships between areas of religious belief and moral order in which children are reared, and the effects of child-rear-ing in various cultures. Professor Ritchie said today the file would have two other uses beside research. It would be used next year as a library by students doing a special course, and could be used in a teaching function for preparing courses. It is expected that school workers through Australia and New Zealand will make use of the file. The cost ,of the file was £3OOO, said Professor Ritchie, which was cheap compared with the £30,000 the original cost to compile. A fifth of the material in the file comprises translations not otherwise available in English and 10 per cent has not otherwise been published.