The Third Congress continued the basic subject areas of its predecessors, with sessions
on planning and administration; classification and cataloging, information storage and
retrieval; bibliography; education and manpower; national and regional systems in
developed countries; and individual libraries.
Professor Kazuo Urata, Chairman of the 5ICML Japan Organizing Committee Program
Committee, was the principal author of a paper describing a computerized serials control
system which had been developed at Keio University. This was a topic of much interest and
primacy concern in the 1960s, and the pioneering work of a number of libraries and systems
in different countries undertaken in that period laid a solid ground for the present high
level of development of such programs.
This congress was the first which addressed the problems of medical libraries in
developing countries in depth. It featured a series of survey papers on South Asia, Latin
America, the Middle East, and Africa. Other papers dealt with specific countries or
systems and the state of bibliographic control. There were not very many delegates from
developing countries present in Amsterdam, and active participation in the congresses by
developing countries first took place in Belgrade, where approximately one-third of the
attendees were from these countries.
--excerpted from The International Congresses on
Medical Librarianship Thirty Years of Evolutionary Change by Irwin Pizer.